Clemson University
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Theses
5-2010
'Champions of Contending Armies': The Ancient
Rivalry Between Massachusetts and South
Carolina, 1829-1856
William Merrell
Clemson University, [email protected]
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Merrell, William, "'Champions of Contending Armies': The Ancient Rivalry Between Massachusetts and South Carolina, 1829-1856"
(2010). All Theses. Paper 769.
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“CHAMPIONS OF CONTENDING ARMIES”: THE ANCIENT RIVALRY BETWEEN
MASSACHUSETTS AND SOUTH CAROLINA, 1829-1856
A Thesis
Presented to
the Graduate School of
Clemson University
In Partial Fulfillment
of the Requirement for the Degree
Master of Arts
History
by
William Thomas Merrell
May 2010
Accepted by:
Dr. Paul Christopher Anderson, Committee Chair
Dr. Rod Andrew
Dr. Christa Smith
ABSTRACT
The focus of this work is the “ancient rivalry” between Massachusetts and South
Carolina, as it played out in the antebellum era. Although little attention has been
devoted exclusively to the study of this rivalry, it exercised a considerable degree of
influence over the nation on its path to civil war. Most notably, this rivalry directly
impacted the emergence of an American national identity between 1830 and 1860. The
self-perpetuating rivalry between South Carolina and Massachusetts helped define the
parameters of American identity, and ensured the eventual exclusion of South Carolina
from such an identity. Filtered through three specific episodes, this work will show how
a unique South Carolina psychology and identity emerged in response to the state’s
exclusion from American identity. This psychology gave South Carolinians the
individual and collective social capacity to play an unparalleled role in the American
Civil War. This role was characterized by their ability to inaugurate the secession
movement and do so unanimously; their ability to embrace secession and celebrate its
realization; their ability to offer a greater degree of support to the Confederate cause than
their neighbors—including lower exemption and desertion percentages, higher enlistment
and casualty percentages, and a more cooperative relationship with the Confederate
government.
The first chapter will present the Great Debate between South Carolina’s Robert
Young Hayne and Massachusetts’s Daniel Webster. This chapter will show how
Webster, over the course of the debate, established the historical legitimacy of a perpetual
union and the historical illegitimacy of state interposition. In doing so, he excluded
ii
South Carolina nullification from his conception of American identity, and initiated the
process by which all South Carolinians would eventually be excluded. In addition, the
debate between Hayne and Webster helped engender a number of perceived foibles that
would become associated with South Carolina over the next few decades, alienating the
state from the rest of the nation.
The second chapter will depict the controversy between Massachusetts’s Lorenzo
Sabine and South Carolina’s William Gilmore Simms. This chapter will relay how
Sabine excluded the majority of white South Carolinians from the nation’s unifying
historical experience, thereby establishing a separate, aberrant South Carolina historical
narrative. Because of the relationship between historical experience and collective
identity, this episode ensured the emergence of a distinct South Carolina identity.
The final chapter will explore Charles Sumner’s critique of South Carolina and
Preston Brooks’s subsequent retaliation. Sumner’s treatment of South Carolina was an
extension of the remarks made by Webster and Sabine. Decrying the entire history of
South Carolina, Sumner provided for the unconditional exclusion of South Carolinians.
With this exclusion, South Carolina witnessed the evaporation of unionism within the
state. Barred from American nationality, South Carolinians turned to their state for a
source of identity.
iii
DEDICATION
For my Mother and Father
iv
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The journey that has culminated in the completion of this thesis was begun five years
ago. Regarding Master’s degrees in general, the length of time which it has taken to
complete this work has been remarkably long. Having been so long accustomed to view
the process I was engaged in as interminable, I am now inclined to view its termination as
nothing short of a miracle. Reaching the miraculous end of my protracted journey, I must
now convey my ineffable gratitude to all the invaluable parties who have aided me along
the way.
Dr. Paul Anderson has been my greatest academic mentor. I consider it one of my
life’s greatest privileges to have had the opportunity to learn from him both as an
undergraduate and as a graduate student at Clemson University. And I consider it one of
my greatest misfortunes to have not had the opportunity to take more of his classes. He is
a brilliant man, and has given me a great deal of insight into the South, history, and
people in general. Dr. Rod Andrew and Dr. Christa Smith are prime examples of why
Clemson’s Department of History and Geography epitomizes what every academic
institution should be, a place where intellects engage in a network of understanding and
ideas, with mutual respect and support, for the advancement of education and the
betterment of society. All three of these professors are great scholars, but, more
importantly, they are good people. Their support and advice has been tremendous.
I am indebted to the staffs and personnel at the South Caroliniana Library in
Columbia, the Strom Thurmond Institute at Clemson, The Cooper Library at Clemson,
and the Laurens branch of the Laurens County Library. These people have generously
v
provided the research assistance necessary to the completion of such a monumental task.
I am also grateful to the people of South Carolina, past and present, old and young, black
and white, man and woman. They have been a constant source of inspiration.
My family has been particularly instrumental in the completion of this thesis. They
have been steadfast in their devotion to my cause, offering more encouragement,
financial support, and love than I deserve. I am most appreciative of my precious wife.
She has endured more hardships than anyone over the course of this journey. With an
uncommon degree of love and patience, she has borne the fiscal burden of our household,
and tolerated a great deal on my behalf.
I am grateful to the members of College Street Baptist Church, and the members of
my faith at large, for the many, many prayers and intercessions made on my behalf
during this process. Their faith has strengthened mine, and their love is a testament to the
love of God.
Finally, I owe an eternal debt of gratitude to my God, the Maker of men, and my
Savior, Jesus Christ. Eugene Genovese once concluded that the Christian faith of
African-Americans was the only thing that could explain how they were able to survive
the numerous tribulations they have endured for centuries. I believe this is a fitting
explanation for how any Christian individual is able to survive the many trials of life.
This thesis was long and arduous, and there were countless nights when I felt like giving
up. It is through my faith alone that the light of hope survived. God believes in us all,
and this is the greatest source of strength I can imagine.
vi
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Page
TITLE PAGE…………………………………………………………………………...…i
ABSTRACT………………………………………………………………………………ii
DEDICATION……………………………………………………………………………iv
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS………………………………………………………………...v
INTRODUCTION………………………………………………………………………...1
CHAPTER
I:
DUELING TONGUES: THE HAYNE-WEBSTER DEBATE………………..10
II: DUELING PENS: THE SABINE-SIMMS CONTROVERSY………………..49
III: THE CANING OF MR. SUMNER: THE BROOKS-SUMNER AFFAIR……77
CONCLUSION………………………………………………………………………....113
REFERENCES………………………………………………………………………....116
vii
INTRODUCTION
“Massachusetts and South Carolina. The two representative States of
the Union, like the two champions of contending armies, are doomed to
settle between them the great struggle which must continue to be kept up
between the North and the South.”
-New York Daily Times, 27 May 1856
Sue McDowell, opening her journal on New Years Day 1861, wrote: “Gloriously my
loved Carolina, have you moved in these hours which try mens souls. Your sons do no
dishonor to the soil which germinated a Marion and Sumter…and time will indelibly
stamp your name upon the pages of history, with the 21st of December as the era from
which to date your sovereignty.”1 Spartanburg farmer David G. Harris confided in his
journal: “I do hope the State or rather the Republic of South Carolina will not concede or
retract, or submit in no respect whatever. She has taken a bold and noble stand, she must
and will maintain it let it cost as much blood and money as it may. I for one am glad she
has committed herself, and do not fear the consequences.”2 The Keowee Courier
proclaimed: “The long looked for and long hoped for period has at length arrived when a
sovereign State (long oppressed by her enemies, who should have been her friends,)
would throw aside the shackles by which she was bound, arise in the majesty of her
power, and declare herself a free and independent Government.”3 A correspondent for
the Carolina Spartan wrote, “And thus was passed, ratified and sanctioned in the city of
Charleston, the 20th of December, 1860, the glorious act of secession, which is to make
1
Sue McDowell, Journal of Sue McDowell, January 1, 1861, South Caroliniana Library archives, Columbia, SC.
David G. Harris, Piedmont Farmer: The Journals of David Golightly Harris 1855-1870, ed. Philip N. Racine
(Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1990), 168.
3
Keowee Courier, January 5, 1861.
2
1
the Southern States the greatest people under the sun, and South Carolina the greatest
State of them all.”4
These testimonies, and numerous others like them, reveal the peculiar implications of
secession to the people of South Carolina. By 1860, the Union was an institution most
northerners were willing to go to war to save, and one most southerners were only willing
to destroy as an extreme last resort, and even then with extreme apprehension and
reluctance. The sole exception was South Carolina, where secession was embraced
ardently, anticipated eagerly, and celebrated almost universally. To be the first state to
pioneer such uncharted waters, South Carolina displayed the least hesitation and
apprehension.
As the quotes of McDowell, Harris, the Courier, and the Spartan reveal, secession,
for South Carolinians, was more than a pragmatic attempt to preserve slavery, or the
forceful assertion of the validity of the States Rights doctrine. The passion with which
many South Carolinians received secession indicates disunion meant something entirely
different in South Carolina than anywhere else. This thesis isn’t an examination into the
motives behind South Carolina secession, which have been examined time and again.
Rather, it is an exploration of the act of seceding, how and why it occurred as it did in
South Carolina, and what it meant to the people of South Carolina.
The circumstances surrounding the South Carolina secession movement were an
appropriate expression of what James M. Banner dubbed “The Problem of South
Carolina,” in reference to South Carolina’s unique antebellum radicalism. When Banner
4
Spartanburg Carolina Spartan, Jan. 3, 1861, as quoted by Harold S. Schultz, Nationalism and Sectionalism in South
Carolina, 1852-1860: A Study of the Movement for Southern Independence (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University
Press, 1950),
2
coined this term, he unknowingly pioneered a subject that would become the focus of
continual historical discussion and examination. Seeking to explain “the problem of
South Carolina,” Banner argued that the state’s unique political culture—preeminently
defined by the absence of a two-party system--created an atmosphere conducive to
radical behavior. Kenneth S. Greenberg also advanced a political explanation.
According to Greenberg, the American Revolution altered the political practices of every
American state save South Carolina. Dedicated to a system of virtual representation in an
era of actual representation, the widening gulf between South Carolinians and their
countrymen resulted in aberrant behavior.5
Both Manisha Sinha and William W. Freehling explain the “Problem of South
Carolina” as a product of the planter aristocracy’s dominance in state politics. Manisha
Sinha claims this ruling class of Carolinians became wedded to an emerging “political
ideology of slavery.” According to Freehling, the planter aristocracy developed a unique
“planter psychology,” as they shifted “between one of the most debilitating inferiority
complexes in nineteenth-century America and one of the most soaring superiority
complexes any ruling class will ever develop.” However, Sinha and Freehling both credit
the South Carolina aristocracy with too much influence.6
According to Lacy K. Ford and Stephanie McCurry, South Carolina’s planter
aristocracy did not exercise nearly as much control as Freehling and Sinha would have us
5
James M. Banner, Jr., “The Problem of South Carolina,” in The Hofstadter Aegis: A Memorial, ed. Stanley Elkins and
Eric McKitrick (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1974), 60-93; Kenneth S. Greenberg, “Representation and the Isolation
of South Carolina, 1776-1860,” The Journal of American History, vol. 64, no. 3 (Dec., 1977), 723-743, in JSTOR
[database online]; accessed 18 April 2005.
6
Manisha Sinha, The Counterrevolution of Slavery: Politics and Ideology in Antebellum South Carolina (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 2-13, 24-25; William W. Freehling, The Road to Disunion: Secessionists at
Bay, 1776-1854 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 213-252.
3
believe. The inclusion of yeomen in the democratic process, and high voter turnout in
several closely contested elections, forced the state’s political elite to recognize the
opinions and wishes of their less privileged neighbors. Examining the historiography of
South Carolina extremism, James Haw notes this contradiction, conceding that Freehling
was probably correct in noting “that one key to the state’s antebellum extremism lies in
its individual and social psychology.” However, if the conclusions of Ford and McCurry
are credible, and the planter class was not as dominant as Freehling indicates, Haw
suggests “an explanation broader than planter psychology may be called for.”7
That is precisely what this thesis aims to do--provide a broader explanation by
tracing the development of a broader psychology: a South Carolina psychology. Only a
broad, all-inclusive South Carolina psychology can explain the presence of “the Problem
of South Carolina” among South Carolina women, yeomen farmers, and inhabitants of
the state’s white-majority districts not dominated by planters and plantations. The
impetus for such a psychology must be applicable to all relevant segments of the
population. In searching for this impetus, I found a substantial amount of evidence
indicating a gradual and sustained effort to exclude South Carolina from an emerging
national identity, eventually leading to the universal exclusion of South Carolinians. This
exclusion was the catalyst for “the Problem of South Carolina.”
The prevalence of exclusion is central to the development of nationality. “Wherever
and whenever nationalism has developed in notably vigorous form,” writes David M.
7
Lacy K. Ford, Jr., Origins of Southern Radicalism: The South Carolina Upcountry, 1800-1860 (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1988), 99-144; Stephanie McCurry, Masters of Small Worlds: Yeoman Households, Gender
Relations, and the Political Culture of the Antebellum South Carolina Lowcountry (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1997), 240, 92-93, 127, 104-106, 115-116, 255; James Haw, “ ‘The Problem of South Carolina’ Reexamined: A
Review Essay,” The South Carolina Historical Magazine, vol. 107, no. 1 (January 2006), 25.
4
Potter, “it has been in circumstances of conflict between the nationalizing group and
some other group. In such a situation, the rejection of the out-group not only strengthens
the cohesion of the in-group, but imparts to the members of the in-group a greater
awareness of what they share.” According to Susan-Mary Grant, the South became the
out-group described by Potter, as “northerners managed to exclude the South from their
vision of American national identity. Indeed, they came to rely on the South as the
essential negative reference point in the construction of that identity.” While the basic
premises of Grant’s argument are certainly valid, her thesis has greater relevance when
applied specifically to South Carolina as the negative point of reference. The concept of
a union for the sake of union, central to the development of American national identity,
was articulated by Daniel Webster and broadcast to a receptive national audience in
direct contrast to the doctrine of nullification, whereby South Carolina alone was aligned
against the Union. And Lorenzo Sabine’s history of the American Revolution set South
Carolina’s past, in particular, against the history of the rest of the country. Early
American nationalism took shape by using South Carolina as a negative point of
reference.8
This thesis is a study of national identities, and traces the simultaneous development
of an American national identity predicated upon the exclusion of South Carolina, and a
8
Eric Foner, Who Owns History? Rethinking the Past in a Changing World (New York: Hill and Wang, 2002), 150151: “Nowhere is this symbiotic relationship between inclusion and exclusion—between a national creed that
emphasizes democracy and freedom as universal rights and a reality of limiting these entitlements to particular groups
of people—more evident than in debates over that fundamental question “Who is an American?”; David M. Potter, Don
E. Fehrenbacher, ed., The Impending Crisis, 1848-1861 (New York: Harper & Row, 1976), 450; Susan-Mary Grant,
North Over South: Northern Nationalism and American Identity in the Antebellum Era (Lawrence: University of
Kansas Press, 2000), 56; Harlow W. Sheidley, “The Webster-Hayne Debate: Recasting New England’s Sectionalism,”
The New England Quarterly, vol. 67, no. 1 (Mar., 1994), 24, in JSTOR [database online]; accessed 5 June 2007.
According to Sheidley, Webster’s reply to Hayne was “the most widely read congressional speech of its era.”
5
South Carolina identity whose emergence was a reaction to this exclusion. Although I
focus on the term identity throughout, and rarely refer explicitly to psychology, I am
using the term within its contextual relationship to a South Carolina psychology. The
South Carolina psychology and South Carolina identity have correlative relevance. South
Carolina’s behavior was influenced by an emerging South Carolina psychology, and this
psychology was engendered and defined based upon how South Carolinians saw
themselves and their perceptions of how others saw them. In this sense, South Carolina
identity is understood to be intrinsically bound to a South Carolina psychology. For the
purpose of this thesis, any reference to South Carolina identity and a South Carolina
psychology should be understood to regard white South Carolinians. Although there is
some evidence to suggest free blacks had access to the emergence of a state psychology,
the majority of antebellum South Carolinians were slaves of African descent with no
inclination to develop the same psychological outlook of white Carolinians.9
The existence of a third identity—Southern, or Confederate, identity—has oftentimes
muddled the distinctions between American and South Carolina identities. For the
purpose of this thesis, Southern identity can be delineated to the defense of sectional
interests. According to David M. Potter, the conflict between the North and the South
resulting in the Civil War was the result of conflicting sectional interests and the inability
9
For evidence suggesting free black South Carolinians may have developed a similar outlook to that of white
Carolinians, see Michael P. Johnson and James L. Roark, Black Masters: A Free Family of Color in the Old South
(New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1984), 293. Johnson and Roark quote an address to the Governor of South
Carolina signed by eighty-two free mulattoes from Charleston, expressing their attachment to South Carolina: “We are
by birth citizens of South Carolina….Our attachments are with you, our hopes of safety & protection from you. Our
allegiance is due to So. Ca. and in her defense, we are willing to offer up our lives, and all that is dear to us.” Also,
William S. McFeely, review of Black Masters, by Michael P. Johnson and James L. Roark, The Nation, 240 (February
1985), 151, in Expanded Academic [database online], accessed 19 April 2005. McFeely mentions William Ellison of
Statesburg, South Carolina, a free black planter whose support for the Confederacy rivaled that of his white neighbors.
Ellison owned more slaves and ninety percent of the white population, and transferred his plantation output to produce
food for the Confederacy. Ellison also had a grandson fight for the Confederate army.
6
to sustain political equilibrium in a growing, multi-sectional democracy. “For the major
premise of a democracy, that the majority shall rule,” writes Potter, “is predicated upon
the assumption that the majority is part of some larger whole, whose existence as a
totality is identifiable enough to give assurance that those persons who are imposing their
will on the one hand, and those who are submitting to the imposition on the other, are
really part of the same people and are, as one whole, bound by the will of their larger
part.” As the country expanded west, the North outpaced the South in the accumulation
of states, population, and political clout, and was thus able to recast their sectional
interests as America’s national interests.10
With regard to the South in general, sectional interests were not secure because
southerners were considered part of an American totality. Democracy sanctioned the will
of the majority, in this instance the North, over the minority. Disunion was a means of
protecting their sectional interests when democracy failed to do so. But with regard to
South Carolina, disunion meant more than the protection of sectional interests. South
Carolina’s exclusion from national identity didn’t mean exemption from the will of the
majority. It meant a negation of the rights and safeguards afforded to all members of a
totality, and a denial of self-government. Just as South Carolina’s slaves were unable to
exercise control over their own destiny because of their skin color, white South
Carolinians witnessed the emergence of an America in which being a South Carolinian
automatically conferred a sense of inferiority and powerlessness. This is why South
Carolina’s behavior was more radical than other southern states, why secession took on a
10
David M. Potter, “The Historian’s Use of Nationalism and Vice Versa,” The American Historical Review, vol. 67,
no. 4 (Jul., 1962), 924-950.
7
unique flavor in the Palmetto State, and why South Carolina’s commitment to the
Confederacy and the war effort surpassed all other southern states. Disunion was to
white South Carolinians what insurrection was to their slaves--the last desperate attempt
to assert authority over their own destiny, not merely in the narrow sense relating to the
protection of temporary, sectional interests, but in a broader respect encompassing all
aspects of their lives, their liberty, and any and all interests they might ever have.
Several historians and contemporaries have noted the existence of an “ancient
rivalry” existing between South Carolina and Massachusetts. This terminology has been
employed to describe the rivalry in a qualitative, rather than chronological, sense. It is
meant to convey an epic enmity, not an aged conflict. It was a rivalry akin to that of
Athens and Sparta, Greece and Persia, Rome and Carthage, and any of the other grand,
transcendent rivalries in human history. I have framed the emergence of a South
Carolina psychology against the backdrop of such a rivalry, because three prominent
episodes of this rivalry adequately explain the inception, maturation, and proliferation of
a unique South Carolina psychology and South Carolina’s exclusion from American
identity: the Hayne-Webster Debate (1830), the Sabine-Simms Controversy (1847-1856),
and the Brooks-Sumner Affair (1856).
The presence of history in this rivalry is of critical importance. In each episode,
history is central to the ensuing debate. It was precisely this presence of the past that
facilitated the development of conflicting identities. During the course of the HayneWebster Debate, Daniel Webster depicted South Carolina nullification as having no
historical precedence in America’s past. Seventeen years later, Lorenzo Sabine depicted
8
South Carolina as, by and large, a British ally during the American Revolution, thus,
occupying a separate past from other Americans. Finally, Charles Sumner argued that
the history of South Carolina contributed nothing to the history of the United States, nor
civilization, and was virtually worthless. History was both the pivotal catalyst for—and
the potent conduit of—the dissensions and aspersions which dominated this rivalry
during the antebellum years. More importantly, history was the means by which
Webster, Sabine, and Sumner excluded South Carolina from their construction of
American identity. Their usage of history was responsible for “the problem of South
Carolina.”
9
CHAPTER ONE
DUELING TONGUES: THE HAYNE-WEBSTER DEBATE
“As we shall see in his 1850 Compromise speeches, Webster liked to use
the states as microcosms of geographic sections and build his arguments
from that inductive position. In a way, the battle between Hayne and
Webster was synecdoche for the battle over how South Carolina and
Massachusetts would be perceived….”11
“South Carolina reproached by Massachusetts!” thundered the eloquent
Charlestonian from the floor of the Senate.12 Robert Young Hayne was answering
charges made by the equally talented Daniel Webster of Massachusetts. The ensuing
debate between these two silver-tongued masters of oratory has rightly been remembered
in the pages of American history as “The Great Debate.” Originating in the winter of
1829-30, the debate between Hayne and Webster represents the dawning of a new age in
American history. As is the case with the dawning of any age, the figurative day ahead
was both thrillingly new and menacingly unpredictable. As the founding generation of
Americans faded into memory, a new generation grappled with the ambiguous nature of
their union, egalitarian reforms, and the emergence of historical consciousness, national
identity, and sectional politics. Because all of these issues, and more, converged in the
debate between Hayne and Webster, it is perhaps one of the most inestimably complex
and important events in American history.
*****
11
Craig R. Smith, Daniel Webster and the Oratory of Civil Religion (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2005),
112.
12
Register of Debates in Congress, 21 Cong., 1 Sess., 51.
10
“Far, indeed, in my wishes, very far distant be the day, when our associated and
fraternal stripes shall be severed asunder, and when that happy constellation under which
we have risen to so much renown, shall be broken up, and be seen sinking, star after star,
into obscurity and night.”13 Such was the somber depiction of disunion conveyed by
Massachusetts senator Daniel Webster in his memorable debate with Robert Young
Hayne of South Carolina. Although this entire metaphor is important in understanding
the significance of the Hayne-Webster Debate, two words in particular are of critical
importance: have risen. By 1830, according to Daniel Webster, the Union was not a
happy constellation under which its several stars were rising or would rise, but one in
which they had already risen.
The phrase have risen is specifically important because it is a reference to the past, to
an historical occurrence. It is an admission of historical consciousness. For the second
generation of Americans, such as Hayne and Webster, American identity was rooted in a
common historical experience. 14 In his debate with Hayne, Daniel Webster sought to
define American identity upon the foundation of a perpetual union. But by 1830,
American identity was based upon the past, and defining it meant establishing the
historical legitimacy of his argument. Webster ultimately succeeded not because he
merely established the historical legitimacy of his own argument, but because he was able
to depict nullification as historically illegitimate—in accordance with the country’s two
13
Ibid, 38.
Eileen Ka-May Cheng, “American Historical Writers and the Loyalists, 1788-1856: Dissent, Consensus, and
American Nationality,” Journal of the Early Republic, Vol. 23, No. 4 (Winter, 2003), 495; Susan-Mary Grant, North
Over South: Northern Nationalism and American Identity in the Antebellum Era (Lawrence: University of Kansas
Press, 2000), 28, 56; J. V. Matthews, “‘Whig History’: The New England Whigs and a Usable Past,” The New England
Quarterly, Vol. 51, No. 2 (Jun., 1978), 193.
14
11
rivaling interpretations of history—excluding the doctrine of state interposition, and its
proponents, from American identity and endowing South Carolina with an enduring,
multifaceted notoriety.
*****
Although the contest between Webster and Hayne would eventually be remembered
in the pages of American history as The Great Debate, theirs was but one in a prolonged
series of debates over the American Union. Its greatness was not manifested in their
essential arguments and assumptions over the union, neither of which were novel. When
Webster argued for a perpetual union, necessary to the blessings of a composite
American people, he was restating the claims of Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and the
Federalists. And when Hayne portrayed the American Union as a confederation of
sovereign states, he was reflecting earlier sentiments expressed by Richard Henry Lee
and the Anti-Federalists.15 Hayne and Webster did not differentiate themselves from
their predecessors by reasserting old arguments, but by placing those arguments in a
broader historic context.
For the founding generation, the legacy of the American Revolution, or what they
hoped would be the legacy, was achieving a perfect balance of liberty and power. “As
too much power leads to despotism,” explained Alexander Hamilton, “too little leads to
anarchy, and both eventually to the ruin of the people.”16 The founders saw the union as
a great experiment in self-government. While all were committed to the success of the
15
Kenneth M. Stampp, “The Concept of a Perpetual Union,” The Imperiled Union: Essays on the Background of the
Civil War, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 5-33.
16
James H. Read, Power versus Liberty: Madison, Hamilton, Wilson, and Jefferson (Charlottesville: University Press
of Virginia, 2000), 63.
12
experiment, they lacked a consensus on what the nature of the union should be as to
ensure success. The Federalists advocated a strong central government to maintain order,
while the Anti-Federalists believed the concentrated power of such a government would
threaten liberty.
Thus, when Webster advocated a strong central government and a perpetual union,
necessary to “our prosperity, felicity, safety,” he was restating the claims of the
Federalists.17 Alexander Hamilton had forewarned, “the states will be dangerous” to the
authority of the federal government, and “ought to be extinguished;”18 and John Jay, in
The Federalist no. 2, concurred:
A strong sense of the values and blessings of union induced the people, at
a very early period, to institute a federal government to preserve and
perpetuate it….It is worthy of remark that not only the first, but every
succeeding Congress, as well as the late convention, have invariably
joined with the people in thinking that the prosperity of America depended
on its Union. To preserve and perpetuate it was the great object of the
people in forming that convention….19
Just as Hayne and the South Carolina Nullifiers would later contest the logic of Webster’s
perpetual union, the arguments of Hamilton and Jay were checked by those from AntiFederalists such as John Randolph, who described the union as a “means of securing the
safety, liberty, and welfare of the confederacy and not itself an end to which these should
be sacrificed.”20 And from this disparity of opinions America’s earliest political
divisions ensued.
*****
17
Register of Debates in Congress, 21 Cong., 1 Sess., 29.
As quoted by Kenneth M. Stampp, “The Concept of a Perpetual Union,” 17.
19
John Jay, “The Federalist. No. II,” The Federalist: A Commentary on the Constitution of the United States (New
York: M. Walter Dunne, Publisher, 1901), 16, 18.
20
As quoted by Stampp, “The Concept of a Perpetual Union,” 20.
18
13
With the passing of the founding fathers, the second generation of Americans
inherited this ambiguously defined union, along with their fathers’ dual fears of anarchy
and tyranny. But by the 1820s America was seen less as an experiment and more of as a
success, and the meaning of America was consigned to its past. History assumed a place
of central importance in American politics. Rivaling interpretations of American history
emerged along ideological lines. Having never been resolved, the questions over the
nature of the union, and the balance of liberty and power, remained relevant. But by the
time Hayne and Webster sparred on the senate floor, they had assumed historic
underpinnings.
Whig and Democratic versions of world history developed into two contrasting
interpretations of the past, and although these interpretations were central to many
political debates, they were not strictly confined along partisan lines. A member of the
Whig party could adhere to the Democratic interpretation of history, and vice versa.
Webster’s depiction of the “happy constellation” was an expression of the Whig
interpretation of history. Indirectly, this interpretation was an extension of the
Federalists’ case for a perpetual union; directly, it was a response to Jacksonian
Democracy. In the early republic, participation in government was restricted to the
“natural aristocracy”, the only class of men believed to be both capable (in a material
sense) and worthy (in a virtuous sense) of guiding the affairs of state.21 The rising tide of
egalitarianism, however, relegated the aristocrat to a position of negligible importance in
21
Robert M. Weir, “ ‘The Harmony We Were Famous For’: An Interpretation of Pre-Revolutionary South Carolina
Politics,” The William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Ser., Vol. 26, no. 4 (Oct., 1969), 476-77, accessed on JSTOR, 22 Jan.
2005; William W. Freehling, The Road to Disunion: Secessionists at Bay, 1776-1854 (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1990), 39-40.
14
the political and social arenas of the United States. The rise of the common man,
culminating in the 1828 election of Andrew Jackson, invoked fresh fears of the anarchy
forewarned by Alexander Hamilton. A woman attending Jackson’s first presidential
inauguration described the ensuing chaos:
“But what a scene did we witness! The Majesty of the People had
disappeared, and a rabble, a mob, of boys, negroes, women, children,
scrambling, fighting, romping. What a pity what a pity! No arrangements
had been made no police officers placed on duty and the whole house had
been inundated by the rabble mob. We came too late. The President, after
having been literally nearly pressed to death and almost suffocated and torn
to pieces by the people…had retreated….Cut glass and china to the amount
of several thousand dollars had been broken in the struggle to get
refreshments…Ladies fainted, men were seen with bloody noses and such a
scene of confusion took place as is impossible to describe….I fear,
enlightened Freemen as they are, they will be found, as they have been found
in all ages and countries where they get the Power in their hands, that of all
tyrants, they are the most ferocious, cruel and despotic. The noisy and
disorderly rabble in the President’s House brought to my mind descriptions I
had read, of the mobs in the Tuileries and at Versailles….”22
With such scenes conjuring up images of the French Revolution, the descendants of
America’s Revolutionaries sought to reign in the uncertain implications of their past.
The Whig solution proposed educating the public with an interpretation of national
history designed to restrain the wild and impulsive nature of man, placing the current
generation of Americans in a broader historic context:
It corrects the cold selfishness which would regard ourselves, our day, and
our generation, as a separate and insulated portion of man and time; and
awakening our sympathies for those who have gone before, it makes us
mindful, also, of those who are to follow, and thus binds us to our fathers
and to our posterity by a lengthening and golden chord.23
22
Margaret Smith to Mrs. Kirkpatrick, 22 March 1829, as quoted by Harry L. Watson, Andrew Jackson vs. Henry
Clay: Democracy and Development in Antebellum America (Boston & New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2000), 164165.
23
As quoted by Matthews, 195-196.
15
By fostering an allegiance to all preceding and successive generations, Whigs hoped they
could curb the selfish passions of the people.24 In an era when national allegiance was
based upon allegiance to a national past, the ability of the past to command allegiance
rested upon faith in its capability to solve national problems. Herein lies the impetus for
the Whig interpretation of American history.
The Whig interpretation of history depicted the past as an ongoing narrative of
progress, as humanity searched for harmony and civility in a savage and tumultuous
world. They saw the American Revolution as a climactic moment in this narrative,
securing the ascendancy of order and harmony: a revolution to end all revolution.
Accordingly, American history was placed within that framework, depicted as a direct
product of the past.25 “Our American liberty,” Webster argued, “has an ancestry, a
pedigree, a history. Our ancestors brought to this continent all that was valuable…in the
political institutions of England, and left behind them all that was without value.”26 The
American Whig saw the American Revolution not as a revolution that overthrew the
established order, but as a culminating moment in the narrative of humanity, the
ascension of light over darkness. To the American Whig, their fathers’ legacy was the
establishment of order out of chaos. “American liberty is no opinionated, will-strong,
untamable passion, bursting all bounds of moral restraint, and hungering after anarchy
and license,” claimed Whig Edwin P. Whipple, “but a creative and beneficient energy,
24
Matthews, 194-195; Daniel Walker Howe, The Political Culture of the American Whigs (Chicago: The University of
Chicago Press, 1979), 72.
25
Howe, 70-71, 73; Matthews, 201-203, 205-206.
26
Daniel Webster, “The Rhode Island Government,” The Works of Daniel Webster, vol. 6 (Boston: Little, Brown, and
Company, 1890), 220.
16
organizing itself in laws, professions, trades, arts, institutions.”27 To a Whig, the union
created from the American Revolution was an institution that fulfilled an instrumental
role in civilization. Accordingly, they defined loyalty to the legacy of the American
Revolution in terms of “loyalty to its offspring: the nation, its institutions, the union.”28
The Democratic interpretation of history described the past as an ongoing tale of
oppression. The American Revolution had been an escape from, or triumph over,
history.29 “Probably no other civilized nation,” heralded the Democratic Review, “has at
any period of its history so completely thrown off its allegiance to the past, as the
American.”30 To the American Democrat, the legacy of the Revolution was about
overthrowing despotism and establishing the right of self-government, a legacy that must
be vigilantly guarded. Andrew Jackson warned of the inherent dangers, referring to his
political enemies as “the aristocracy” and conveying his express desire to prevent them
from corrupting the constitution, making “the Government an engine of oppression to the
people instead of the agent of their will.”31
Although both interpretations of the past claimed to check the dual threats of anarchy
and tyranny, they advanced very different ideologies for doing so. As an extension of the
Federalist ideology, the Whig interpretation depicted a strong central government as the
only power capable of combating anarchy and chaos. As an extension of the AntiFederalist ideology, the Democratic interpretation advanced the doctrines of States Rights
as a safeguard against the concentrated, and potentially despotic, power of the Federal
27
As quoted by Matthews, 207.
Matthews, 206.
29
Howe, 70.
30
As quoted by Howe, 70.
31
As quoted by Watson, 233-35.
28
17
Government. Accordingly, the Democratic interpretation claimed the concentration and
abuse of power would inevitably lead to disunion. Ultimately, Webster triumphed over
Hayne because his interpretation of American history depicted South Carolina’s
Nullifiers as both anarchists and tyrants, uniting the nation’s rivaling ideologies in
support of their mutual need for a balance of order and liberty.
*****
The debate between Hayne and Webster began with a resolution proposal from
Connecticut Senator Samuel Foote calling for a restriction on the sale of public lands in
the West. Foote’s proposal was met with sharp opposition from Thomas Hart Benton of
Missouri, who accused New England of seeking to profit at the expense of the West.
Hayne, recognizing an opportunity to nurse an alliance between the South and West,
rushed to the support of Benton. Criticizing the government’s current policy of selling
western lands and placing the profits in the general treasury, Hayne advocated the free
distribution of western land.
Hayne’s first speech exuded elements of the Democratic interpretation of history.
Referencing the recent fortunes of South Carolina, he forewarned of the dangers of a
consolidated government:
In that devoted region, sir, in which my lot has been cast, it is our
misfortune to stand in that relation to the Federal Government, which
subjects us to a taxation which it requires the utmost efforts of our
industry to meet. Nearly the whole amount of our contributions is
expended abroad: we stand towards the United States in the relation of
Ireland to England. The fruits of our labor are drawn from us to enrich
other and more favored sections of the Union; …we exhibit the
extraordinary, the wonderful, and painful spectacle of a country enriched
by the bounty of God, but blasted by the cruel policy of man. The rank
18
grass grows in our streets; our very fields are scathed by the hand of
injustice and oppression.32
Hayne depicted a government analogous to the many despotic regimes of the past, a
recklessly oppressive government unaware of, or unconcerned with, any sense of
wrongdoing or injustice. He presented his audience with the all-too-familiar image of an
unprincipled power incapable of restraining its own tyrannical impulses.
Hayne went on to accuse New England politicians, able to influence governmental
policy via numerical majority, of selfishly wanting to restrict the sale of lands in order to
prevent emigration, supplying the wealthy industrialists of the East with a stable number
of workers. Unable to obtain land in the west, the common man, prevented from the
opportunity to secure personal independence and better his fortunes, would be forced to
relive the ancient narrative of oppression and repeat the cycle of history, as he exhausted
his energy for the profit of another. Appearing to represent the interests of the common
people, Hayne recommended the unrestricted distribution of the public lands, so as to
provide for those people “who in any portion of the country may find themselves unable
to procure a comfortable subsistence by the means immediately within their reach.”33
Discussing the corruptible influence of a national treasury, Hayne continued to
display Democratic tendencies, asking, “Would it be safe to confide such a treasure to the
keeping of our national rulers?”34 With an ambiguous reference to “our national rulers,”
Hayne issued a latent appeal to the widespread fears of despotism, while depicting
himself as the champion of liberty:
32
Register of Debates in Congress, 21 Cong., 1 Sess., 33.
Ibid, 34.
34
Ibid, 33.
33
19
…perhaps I stand alone here in the opinion, but it is one I have long
entertained, that one of the greatest safeguards of liberty is a jealous
watchfulness on the part of the people, over the collection and expenditure
of the public money—a watchfulness that can only be secured where the
money is drawn by taxation directly from the pockets of the people.35
With a vigilant eye on the liberty of the people and the “independence of the States,”
Hayne declared “there is no evil more to be deprecated than the consolidation of this
Government.”36 Here Hayne borrowed directly from the political vocabulary of the AntiFederalists, who had continually decried the threats of a consolidated federal government
in the early days of the republic.37
Webster countered Hayne’s assumptions in his first reply. Claiming the free
distribution of public lands would allow the best lands to be bought up en masse by the
country’s wealthier citizens, he asked “who can say what mischiefs would have ensued, if
Congress had thrown these territories into the hands of private speculation?”38 Paying
homage to Democratic sentiments, Webster depicted the government’s past and present
policies as the least oppressive: “Congress has disposed of the soil in smaller and still
smaller portions, till, at length, it sells in parcels of no more than eighty acres; thus
putting it into the power of every man in the country, however poor, but who has health
35
Ibid, 33.
Ibid, 34.
37
Stampp, 19: According to Richard Henry Lee, “The plan of government now proposed is evidently calculated totally
to change, in time, our condition as a people. Instead of being thirteen republics, under a federal head, it is clearly
designed to make us one consolidated government.” Whitehill of Pennsylvania complained that the phrase “We the
People of the United States” meant that “the old foundation of the Union is destroyed, the principle of confederation
excluded, and a new and unwieldly system of consolidated empire is set up upon the ruins of the present compact
between the States.”
38
Register of Debates in Congress, 21 Cong., 1 Sess., 37.
36
20
and strength, to become a freeholder if he desires, not of barren acres, but of rich and
fertile soil.”39 He then went on to address Hayne’s charges of government corruption:
According to the system of sales, a fixed proportion is every where
reserved as a fund for education. Does education corrupt? Is the
schoolmaster a corrupter of youth? The spelling book, does it break down
the morals of the rising generation? And the Holy Scriptures, are they
fountains of corruption?...Whatever is positively beneficent, whatever is
actively good, whatever spreads abroad benefits and blessings which all
can see, and all can feel, whatever opens intercourse, augments
population, enhances the value of property, and diffuses knowledge—must
all this be rejected and reprobated as a dangerous and obnoxious
policy…?40
According to Webster, the sale of public lands funded roads, schools, and any number of
expenditures beneficial to all Americans. The Federal Government, he claimed, was the
benefactor and guardian of the people, not their enemy. According to Webster’s first
reply, Hayne was the advocate of anti-democratic policies.
Hayne’s first speech had very little to do with the Union per se, and dealt exclusively
with the powers of the Federal Government and the distribution of western lands. Using
government and union interchangeably, Webster turned Hayne’s critique of the
government into an attack on the Union:
Consolidation!—that perpetual cry, both of terror and delusion—
consolidation! Sir, when the gentlemen speak of the effects of a common
fund, belonging to all the States, as having a tendency to consolidation,
what do they mean? Do they mean, or can they mean, any thing more
than that the Union of the States will be strengthened, by whatever
continues or furnishes inducements to the people of the States to hold
together. If they mean merely this, then…the public lands as well as every
thing else in which we have a common interest, tends to consolidation;
and to this species of consolidation every true American ought to be
attached; it is neither more nor less than strengthening the Union itself.
39
40
Ibid, 37.
Ibid, 38-39.
21
This is the sense in which the framers of the constitution use the word
consolidation;….This, sir, is General Washington’s consolidation. This is
the true constitutional consolidation. I wish to see no new powers drawn
to the General Government; but I confess, I rejoice in whatever tends to
strengthen the bond that unites us, and encourages the hope that our Union
may be perpetual.41
While equating Hayne’s critique of a consolidated government with a lack of devotion to
the Union, Webster also sought to establish the historic credibility of his argument, by
declaring his unmitigated support for “General Washington’s consolidation.” In doing
so, Webster depicted Hayne’s opposition to consolidation as an attack upon the legacy of
the Founding Fathers.
To strengthen the association between disunion sympathies and Hayne’s critique of
consolidated government, Webster immediately went on to reference the well-known
comments of one of Hayne’s constituents:
I know there are some persons in the part of the country from which the
honorable member comes who habitually speak of the Union in terms of
indifference, or even of disparagement….They significantly declare, that it
is time to calculate the value of the Union; and their aim seems to be to
enumerate, and to magnify all the evils, real and imaginary, which the
government under the Union produces. The tendency of all these ideas
and sentiments is obviously to bring the Union into discussion, as a mere
question of present and temporary expediency; nothing more than a mere
matter of profit and loss. The Union to be preserved, while it suits local
and temporary purposes to preserve it; and to be sundered whenever it
shall be found to thwart such purposes. Union, of itself, is considered by
the disciples of this school as hardly a good. It is only regarded as a
possible means of good; or on the other hand, as a possible means of evil.
They cherish no deep and fixed regard for it, flowing from a thorough
conviction of its absolute and vital necessity to our welfare.42
41
42
Ibid, 38.
Ibid, 38.
22
Webster was referring specifically to Thomas Cooper, the English-born emigrant to
South Carolina, who, as president of South Carolina College, had led the Southern
nationalist wing of the South Carolina Nullification party.43 In July of 1827, Cooper
delivered his infamous “Value of the Union” Speech, in which he questioned the benefits
received by the South in a Union “whose effect will be to sacrifice the south to the north,
by converting us into colonies and tributaries—to tax us for their own emolument—to
claim the right of disposing of our honest earnings--…in short, to impoverish the planter,
and to stretch the purse of the manufacturer.”44
There is a clear parallel between elements of Coopers “Value of the Union” Speech
and Hayne’s first speech on Mr. Foote’s Resolution, in which he lamented how the
“fruits” of southern “labor are drawn from us to enrich the other and more favored
sections of the Union;…”45 This, then, creates an implicit connection between Hayne
and the “party of men” Webster was explicitly referring to in his First and Second
Replies. Webster’s reference to Cooper was important because it implied a calculating,
conditional devotion to the Union, indicative of an absence of the selflessness prized by
both Whigs and Democrats as a restraint on anarchy and tyranny. Furthermore, Webster
began to associate Cooper with the negative stereotypes typically reserved for “Yankees.”
Webster bolstered these claims during his second reply to Hayne. More importantly, by
claiming this party of South Carolinians calculated the value of the union for “local and
temporary purposes,” he separated them from both legacies of the American Revolution.
43
John McCardell, The Idea of a Southern Nation: Southern Nationalists and Southern Nationalism, 1830-1860 (New
York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1979), 38.
44
William W. Freehling, ed., The Nullification Era: A Documentary Record (New York: Harper & Row, 1967), 21.
45
Register of Debates in Congress, 21 Cong., 1 Sess., 33.
23
As he neared the conclusion of his first reply, Webster delved into a defense of New
England, depicting the region as historically, and selflessly, securing the interests of the
West. “She solicits for no especial thanks;” proclaimed Webster, “but, in the
consciousness of having done her duty in these things, uprightly and honestly, and with a
fair and liberal spirit, be assured she will repel, whenever she thinks the occasion calls for
it, an unjust and groundless imputation of partiality and selfishness.”46 Webster made the
most of his opportunity to defend his region and dispel some of the negative aspects of its
past. In conjunction with his implication of South Carolina selfishness, this was the bait
which all but guaranteed Hayne would respond by matching Webster’s provincial stance,
thereby changing the course of the debate entirely. To this end, Webster then reminded
the Senate that a South Carolina representative, George McDuffie, had in 1825 objected
to the construction of western roads on the grounds that it would drain the population of
eastern states.47 This showed the earlier policy of certain South Carolinians to be the
same policy Hayne was now pinning on Webster and New England.
Finally, Webster closed his first reply, declaring “As a true Representative of the
State which has sent me here, it is my duty, and a duty which I shall fulfill, to place her
history and her conduct, her honor and her character, in their just and proper light, so
often as I think an attack is made upon her so respectable as to deserve to be repelled.”48
Webster’s valiant defense of Massachusetts enticed Hayne to rush to the aid of his own
besieged homeland. Through his ambiguously worded criticisms of South Carolina, and
46
Ibid, 40.
Ibid, 40-41.
48
Ibid, 41.
47
24
his inspiring defense of Massachusetts, Webster was confident Hayne would respond
with the predictable passion of a South Carolina representative.
The implications of Webster’s first reply to Hayne were threefold. It began
establishing the historical legitimacy of the case for a perpetual union, it equated
opposition to a consolidated Federal government with disunion, and it effected a change
in the course of the debate. With regard to the latter, Hayne accommodated Webster in
his rebuttal. As the nation eagerly awaited Hayne’s response, The Boston Advertiser was
sure he “was bound to repel” Webster’s accusations.49
As expected, Hayne responded with the predictable passion and fiery rhetoric of
South Carolina’s antebellum politicians. After voicing his reluctance to engage in the
debate, Hayne compulsively took a militant stance as he charged Webster:
He has crossed the border, he has invaded the State of South Carolina,
is making war upon her citizens, and endeavoring to overthrow her
principles and her institutions. Sir, when the gentleman provokes me
to such a conflict, I meet him at the threshold. I will struggle while I
have life, for our altars and our firesides, and if God gives me strength,
I will drive back the invader discomfited. Nor shall I stop there. If the
gentleman provokes the war, he shall have the war. Sir, I will not stop
at the border; I will carry the war into the enemy’s territory, and not
consent to lay down my arms, until I shall have obtained “indemnity
for the past, and security for the future.”50
Leaving the West to fend for itself, Hayne’s rebuttal came off as militant, arrogant,
extreme and selfish—and in this regard, he couldn’t have assisted Webster more
completely if Webster had scripted Hayne’s response himself.
49
The Boston Advertiser, 9 February 1830, as quoted by Harlow W. Sheidley, “The Webster-Hayne Debate: Recasting
New England’s Sectionalism,” The New England Quarterly, vol. 67, no. 1 (Mar., 1994), 12; also, Sheidley writes in
footnote 25 on page 12: “Wiltse, Calhoun: Nullifier, pp.56-57, correctly understands that Webster deliberately goaded
Hayne in this speech.”
50
Register of Debates in Congress, 21 Cong., 1 Sess., 50.
25
Although Webster had only specifically referenced “some persons” from South
Carolina “who habitually speak of the Union in terms of indifference” and calculate its
value, Hayne’s response seemed to indicate that he interpreted Webster’s remark as
“habitually, South Carolina speaks of the Union in terms of indifference, and declares it
is time to calculate its value.” The tone of Hayne’s rebuttal appears to have had the intent
of combating the latter:
If there be one State in the Union, Mr. President (and I say it not in a boastful
spirit), that may challenge comparison with any other for uniform, zealous,
ardent, and uncalculating devotion to the Union, that State is South Carolina.
Sir, from the very commencement of the Revolution up to this hour, there is
no sacrifice, however great, she has not cheerfully made, no service she has
ever hesitated to perform. She has adhered to you in your prosperity; but in
your adversity she has clung to you with more than filial affection. No matter
what was the condition of her domestic affairs, though deprived of her
resources, divided by parties, or surrounded with difficulties, the call of the
country has been to her as the voice of God. Domestic discord ceased at the
sound; every man became at once reconciled to his brethren, and the sons of
Carolina were all seen crowding together to the temple, bringing their gifts to
the altar of their common country.51
The bulk of Hayne’s second speech was an unequivocal objection to the suggestion that
South Carolina had a calculating devotion to the union. Hayne’s declaration of South
Carolina’s “uncalculating devotion to the union” was indicative of his motive to refute
the very vague implication of South Carolina having a “calculating devotion to the
union.” He went on to recite a roster of historic credentials designed to prove South
Carolina’s “uncalculating” devotion to the union. He created a narrative of South
51
Ibid, 50.
26
Carolina self-sacrifice, beginning with the American Revolution before moving onto the
Revolution of ’98 and the War of 1812.52
Hayne, implying his disbelief that South Carolina would be “reproached by
Massachusetts,” contrasted his narrative of South Carolina’s selfless devotion to the
Union with a history of Massachusetts and its role during the War of 1812 and the
Hartford Convention:
But it seems Massachusetts was to reserve her resources for herself; she
was to defend and protect her own shores. And how was that duty
performed? In some places on the coast neutrality was declared, and the
enemy was suffered to invade the soil of Massachusetts, and allowed to
occupy her territory, until the peace, without one effort to rescue it from
his grasp. Nay, more, while our own Government and our rulers were
considered as enemies, the troops of the enemy were treated like friends;
the most intimate commercial relations were established with them, and
maintained up to the peace.53
Operating in a pre-relativistic age, Hayne and Webster were opposing counsels in the
courtroom of American politics. Each sought to triumph over their opponent by
introducing evidence. This was why Webster referenced Cooper and McDuffie and
South Carolina’s earlier support for the tariffs. This was why Hayne referenced the War
of 1812, the Federalists, and the Hartford Convention. And although Hayne’s “evidence”
followed the same conventions of Webster’s, Webster later managed to transform this
rebuke into an unwarranted attack upon a sister state.
Hayne also attempted to add historic validity to the South Carolina doctrine of
Nullification and reveal the disunion threat of a strong central government. Referring
back to his original criticism of consolidated government, Hayne quoted the similar
52
53
Ibid, 50-51.
Ibid, 53.
27
concerns of Thomas Jefferson.54 Asking his audience “why, sir, does Mr. Jefferson
consider consolidation as leading directly to disunion?” Hayne answered: “Because he
knew that the exercise by the Federal Government, of the powers contended for, would
make this ‘a Government without limitation of powers,’ the submission to which he
considered as a greater evil than disunion itself.”55 While depicting Nullification as a
measure preventative of disunion, Hayne continued to employ history to support his
claim: “The South Carolina doctrine…is the good old Republican doctrine of ’98; the
doctrine of the celebrated ‘Virginia Resolutions’ of that year, and of ‘Madison’s Report
of ’99.’”56 Hayne further expounded upon this equation, quoting the legislatures of
Virginia and Kentucky, before coming to the conclusion that South Carolina had “not
gone one step further than Mr. Jefferson himself was disposed to go.”57 Just as Webster
had defended “General Washington’s consolidation” in the hopes of lending historic
validity to his argument, Hayne sought to place nullification within the framework of
American history by referencing the precedents established by Jefferson and Madison.
Hayne’s rebuttal to Webster was a thorough vindication of South Carolina. It sought
to establish the state’s history within the Union as anything but calculating. It questioned
the propriety and credibility of attacks leveled at the state from Massachusetts, a region
54
Ibid, 55: “In another letter Mr. Jefferson adds: ‘I doubt whether a single fact known to the world will carry as clear
conviction to it of the correctness of our knowledge of the treasonable views of the federal party of that day, as that
disclosed by this the most nefarious and daring attempt to dissever the Union, of which the Hartford Convention was a
subsequent chapter; and both of these having failed, consolidation becomes the fourth chapter of the next book of their
history. But this opens with a vast accession of strength from their younger recruits, who having nothing in them of the
feelings and principles of ’76, now look to a single and splendid Government, &c., riding and ruling over the plundered
ploughman and beggared yeomanry.”—(4 vol. 419,422) The last chapter, says Mr. Jefferson, of that history, is to be
found in the conduct of those who are endeavoring to bring about consolidation: ay, sir, that very consolidation for
which the gentleman from Massachusetts is contending—the exercise, by the Federal Government, of powers not
delegated in relation to ‘internal improvements,’ and ‘the protection of manufactures.’”
55
Ibid, 55.
56
Ibid, 56.
57
Ibid, 57.
28
plagued with the ignominy of the Hartford Convention. It established the historic
precedence that could validate the state’s political doctrine of state interposition. It was
the eloquent attempt to depict nullification as a measure designed entirely to preserve the
Union, the Constitution, and the rights of the people. And if the rest of the nation had
accepted the interpretation of the past presented by Hayne, it would’ve been successful in
its efforts. Unfortunately for Hayne and the South Carolina Nullifiers, this ideal
opportunity for justification also provided Webster with an equally ideal chance to
challenge Hayne’s interpretation of the past, by introducing his own interpretation of
American history.
From the outset of his second reply to Hayne, Webster evinced elements of the chaos
and disorder feared by Americans:
Mr. PRESIDENT: When the mariner has been tossed, for many days, in
thick weather, and on an unknown sea, he naturally avails himself of the
first pause in the storm, the earliest glance of the sun, to take his latitude,
and ascertain how far the elements have driven him from his true course.
Let us imitate this prudence, and, before we float farther, on the waves of
this debate, refer to the point from which we departed, that we may, at
least, be able to form some conjecture where we now are.58
After having Samuel Foote’s resolution re-read, Webster pinned this “storm,” and its
attendant chaos, on Hayne: “We have thus heard, sir, what that resolution is…and it will
readily occur to every one, that it is almost the only subject about which something has
not been said in the speech, running through two days, by which the Senate has been now
entertained by the gentleman from South Carolina.”59
58
59
Ibid, 58.
Ibid, 58.
29
Throughout his first and second replies to Hayne, Webster presented a scintillating
example of the Whig interpretation of history, portraying the Union as the ascendancy,
facilitator, and guardian of order, harmony and civilization. He depicted all the benefits
that had resulted from the Union, and forewarned against the hardships that would befall
Americans outside of it. He described nullification as inevitably resulting in violence. In
accordance with Whig moorings, the Union was depicted as antedating the States. Yet
despite the strong presence of the Whig interpretation of history, Webster paid equal
attention to the Democratic ideology, incorporating elements of it throughout his second
reply to Hayne. “The first settlers of North America,” claimed Webster, “were
enterprising spirits, engaged in private adventure, or fleeing from tyranny at home. When
arrived here, they were forgotten by the mother country, or remembered only to be
oppressed.”60 Webster also harped on the sovereignty of the people: “It is, sir, the
people’s constitution, the people’s Government; made for the people; made by the
people; and answerable to the people.”61 Referencing Hayne’s championship of liberty,
Webster recast Nullifiers as the real oppressors: “But what sort of liberty? The liberty of
establishing their own opinions, in defiance of the opinions of all others; the liberty of
judging and deciding exclusively themselves, in a matter in which others have as much
right to judge and decide as they; the liberty of placing their own opinions above the
judgement of all others, above the laws, and above the constitution.”62 Such a form of
liberty was indicative of autocratic, rather than democratic, governments.
60
Ibid, 63.
Ibid, 74.
62
Ibid, 74-75.
61
30
While Webster’s incorporation of both Whig and Democratic elements helped unite
the country in opposition to South Carolina’s doctrine of state interposition, he ultimately
succeeded at excluding nullification from his construction of American identity because
he was able to present it as historically illegitimate. According to Webster, there was no
historic precedence to validate the South Carolina doctrine. He drew a clear distinction
between nullification and Massachusetts’s earlier course:
In such a case, under such circumstances, how did Massachusetts demean
herself? Sir, she remonstrated, she memorialized, she addressed herself to
the General Government, not exactly “with the concentrated energy of
passion,” but with her own strong sense, and the energy of sober
conviction. But she did not interpose the arm of her own power to arrest
the law and break the embargo….Her principles bound her to two
things….First, to submit to every constitutional law of Congress; and
secondly, if the constitutional validity of the law be doubted, to refer that
question to the decision of the proper tribunals….We thought it a clear
case; but nevertheless, we did not take the law into our own hands,
because we did not wish to bring about a revolution, nor to break up the
Union; for, I maintain, that, between submission to the decision of the
constituted tribunals, and revolution, or disunion, there is no middle
ground; there is no ambiguous condition, half allegiance, and half
rebellion.63
Webster continued to assess the validity of Hayne’s arguments, turning to the Virginia
resolutions. The language providing for interposition in the Virginia and Kentucky
resolutions, Webster claimed, was too ambiguous to unequivocally determine the nature
of said interposition, and he refused to believe that its author “was ever of the opinion
that a State, under the constitution, and in conformity with it, could, upon the ground of
her own opinion of its unconstitutionality…annul a law of Congress….”64 According to
Daniel Webster, there was no constitutional premise to support the doctrine of
63
64
Ibid, 76.
Ibid, 77.
31
nullification, and the only precedence for it in America’s history was in the ineffective
Articles of Confederation, abandoned in 1789 for the current constitution.65
In presenting his case for a perpetual Union, Webster appealed to nearly all segments
of the American population. By the time he delivered his memorable speech, the Union
had become an institution seen by and large as inherently valuable. By 1830, many
Americans could accept a narrative of progress, order and harmony, because that was
precisely the narrative their personal lives bore witness to. Anyone over the age of
fifteen had been alive during America’s defeat of the British in the War of 1812, the
“Second War of Independence.” The years following the close of the war had been
marked by rising patriotism and national confidence. The second generation of
Americans were exceedingly jubilant over the survival of the United States, their fathers’
greatest legacy. International peace was accompanied by apparent domestic harmony.
The policies of economic nationalism and internal improvements had helped foster
economic prosperity. Territorial expansion had opened up land and opportunities out
West, and Indian removal helped limit the dangers of frontier life. And although the
South was largely Democratic at this time, the Whig case for a perpetual union found
receptive audiences throughout the nation. A South Carolina contemporary remarked on
its appeal: “To the great body of the Southern People, the Union is the only tangible &
65
Throughout his second reply to Hayne, Webster made repeated references to state sovereignty and the earlier
Confederation: “If this had not been done, we should not have advanced a single step beyond the old
confederation.” (p.76); “or else we have no constitution of General Government, and are thrust back again to
the days of the confederacy.” (p.77); “The people had had quite enough of that kind of government, under the
Confederacy.” (p.77); “With these, it is a constitution; without them, it is a confederacy.” (p. 78)
32
appreciable representation of Order, & it is solely on this account that they love & sustain
it. Its oppressions must be grievously felt before they will violate Order to resist them.”66
These were the sentiments Daniel Webster appealed to during his contest with
Hayne. Fully aware of the atmosphere of the era, and the affinities of his audience,
Webster delivered his speech with the general public in mind. After concluding his
second reply to Hayne, Webster supervised the publication of his speech, making
numerous revisions to strengthen his case for a perpetual union. He added terminology to
reinforce the perception of Hayne, and nullification, as violent and disruptive. He
removed sentences which might discredit New England, or lead someone to believe than
Hayne’s remarks on the Hartford Convention were valid. After shoring up any
vulnerabilities, almost forty thousand copies of Webster’s reply to Hayne were printed by
Gales and Seaton, making it “the most widely read congressional speech of its era.” It
was the argument for a perpetual union, made directly to the American people.67
“Forty years,” wrote Kenneth Stampp, “had afforded time for the emergence of
numerous interest groups possessing practical reasons for wishing to preserve the Union,
especially those involved directly or indirectly in interstate commerce. Indeed, hardly
any group existed that would not be in some degree adversely affected by disunion.”68 By
1830, the Union represented a safeguard against oppression and anarchy. By equating
nullification with disunion, Webster facilitated the alienation of South Carolina nullifiers.
Furthermore, Webster presented his argument in accordance with the nation’s two
66
As quoted by John Barnwell, Love of Order: South Carolina’s First Secession Crisis (Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 1982), 187.
67
Sheidley, 19-24.
68
Stampp, 30.
33
rivaling interpretations of the past, uniting both Whig and Democratic history in support
of a Union for the sake of union. The popularity of the Union and the patriotic fervor of
the day, coupled with a desire for liberty and order, ensured Webster’s success. Thus,
with his closing remark, their fates were made inevitable: “that other sentiment, dear to
every true American heart,--Liberty and Union, now and for ever, one and
inseparable!”69
These words, ringing out over the floors of Congress, later to be penned, published
and propagated throughout the American public, signaled the victory of Webster and
Massachusetts over Hayne and South Carolina. By depicting nullification as historically
illegitimate, Webster only specifically provided for the conditional exclusion of a party of
South Carolinians, the nullifiers, from his construction of American identity. However,
nullification meant a great deal more to the people of South Carolina than elsewhere.
Although Kenneth Stamp wrote of the near universal benefits the Union supplied the
people of the United States, the majority of white South Carolinians proved to be the
exception.
The economic stimulus for South Carolina’s advocacy of nullification revolved
around the exportation of cotton. Within ten years of the introduction of Eli Whitney’s
cotton gin to South Carolina, “the entire state was in the middle of a tremendous cotton
boom.”70 Whitney’s invention enabled the success of the plantation economy throughout
the state, transforming the backcountry into a younger, more populous replica of the lowcountry parishes. South Carolina, producing forty percent of America’s total cotton
69
Register of Debates in Congress, 21 Cong., 1 Sess., 88.
Margaret Kinard Latimer, “South Carolina—A Protagonist of the War of 1812,” The American Historical Review,
Vol. 61, No. 4 (Jul., 1956), 923.
70
34
exports, with only 3.6 percent of the nation’s total white population, accounted for 10.3
percent of American GDP. The Palmetto State had the highest percentage of exports, per
capita, of the United States.71 With an export driven economy, the tariffs of 1824, 1828
and 1832 were particularly detrimental to the prosperity of South Carolina. The Tariff of
1816 set a 25% tax on imported goods, which was increased to 33% with the Tariff of
1824, and finally to 50% with the 1828 Tariff of Abominations. The price of cotton
exports dropped in accordance with the increase on tariffs. While a pound of cotton
could fetch 18 cents from 1810-19, it could only go for 12 cents from 1820-29, and 9
cents from 1829-32.72 Furthermore, as if to add insult to injury, the internal improvement
policies harming South Carolina the most were benefiting the state the least. According to
Reynolds, “out of a total expenditure of $1,344,000 for internal improvements made up to
1829, only $189,000 had been spent in the South. And of this amount, South Carolina
had received not a single dollar.”73 As other states prospered and thrived under the power
of the federal government, South Carolina suffered and languished. William R. Taylor
noted the effects: “South Carolinians were quick to associate their economic decline with
the growth of the federal government….The bountiful days had come, they knew, before
the Revolution, when South Carolina was still a semi-independent colony doing its own
business and making its own decisions.”74
71
Ibid, 926.
William W. Freehling, The Road to Disunion: Secessionists at Bay, 1776-1854 (New York: Oxford University Press,
1990), 256-257.
73
William Martin Reynolds, Deliberative Speaking in Ante-Bellum South Carolina: The Idiom of a Culture (Ann
Arbor, MI: University Microfilms International, 1980), 133.
74
William R. Taylor, Cavalier & Yankee: The Old South and American National Character (New York: Harper &
Row, Publishers, 1969), 263.
72
35
The depression resulting after the Panic of 1819 affected South Carolina more
severely than other states. According to Taylor, “During the eighteen twenties a
depression of such severity struck South Carolina that Virginia by comparison seemed to
be enjoying flush times.”75 The first phase of the depression, occurring from 1819 to
1822, affected the entire nation, plunging planters throughout South Carolina alongside
their fellow Americans “into their worst depression since the founding of the Republic.”76
The second phase of the depression, from 1822 to 1829, was particularly harmful to the
farmers of the South Carolina upcountry.77
The political makeup of South Carolina during, and after, the Nullification
controversy, can be broken down into three factions: Unionists, Calhounites, and
Southern Nationalists. The Unionist and Calhoun factions were both led by members
from the state’s traditional aristocracy. The Southern Nationalists, on the other hand,
were self-made men. They counted among their leaders George McDuffie, James
Hamilton, Jr., Francis W. Pickens, Robert Barnwell Rhett, Thomas Cooper, E. W.
Johnston, and E. W. Davis. Unlike their opponents, neither the wealth, nor the social and
political status, of these men was inherited from prestigious forbears. And just as they
rose up in the world, the Federal Government threatened to destroy the very fortunes they
had made.78 For these men, a perpetual union offered no guarantees of prosperity, order,
harmony, or opportunity.
75
Ibid, 262.
William W. Freehling, Prelude to Civil War: The Nullification Controversy in South Carolina, 1816-1836 (New
York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1965), 26.
77
Ibid, 27.
78
See McCardell, 39-40; McCardell writes of these men: “When economic disaster struck them, their reaction to the
high tariff took a predictably extreme form, for the tariff seemed to threaten their economic prosperity.”
76
36
Stating the importance of South Carolina’s economic climate and political makeup
during this period is not necessarily meant to explain the motives behind the Nullification
Movement, but rather to establish why South Carolina’s perception of the Union differed
from that of the rest of the nation. During the Nullification period, a great many South
Carolinians could not appreciate the argument for a perpetual Union because the Union
was yielding very different results in South Carolina than in other states. Most
Americans were calculating the value of the Union in 1830, but only in South Carolina
did the calculation yield a negative sum.
As South Carolina became the first state to formally test the doctrine of state
interposition, they clung to the legacy of the American Revolution and the language of
Hayne, Webster, and their forefathers:
…South Carolina now bears the same relation to the manufacturing States
of this confederacy, that the Anglo American Colonies bore to the mother
country….[T]he majority of Congress [are] our inexorable
oppressors….They are tyrants by the very necessity of their position.
With us, it is a question involving our most sacred rights—those very
rights which our common ancestors left to us as a common
inheritance….It is a question of liberty on one hand, and slavery on the
other.79
But the Hayne-Webster Debate had undermined this claim, and South Carolina alone
recognized the parallels.
South Carolina’s extenuating circumstances resulted in the formal act of
Nullification in 1832, and with it, a great deal of enduring hostility emerged between the
rest of the nation and South Carolina. “The nullification movement,” writes John
79
“Address to the People of the United States by the Convention of the People of South Carolina,” as quoted by
McCardell, 47.
37
Barnwell, “endowed South Carolina with a reputation for arrogance, for extremism, and
for pursuing her own course regardless of its impact on her neighbors.”80 Barnwell is
correct in his observation of South Carolina’s unflattering reputation, but the debate
between Hayne and Webster deserves as much credit for it as the actual act of nullifying
a federal law. Webster depicted South Carolina as arrogant, as extreme, as selfishly
pursuing her own interests with disregard for the welfare of other states. In the process of
excluding the South Carolina doctrine from American identity, Webster, with the
unwitting assistance of Hayne, helped engender a number of stereotypes which would
stick with South Carolina throughout the antebellum period, helping further prevent their
inclusion.
When Robert Hayne “carried the war into enemy territory,” he was only helping the
rest of the nation associate himself and his state with the belligerence and conflict they
feared. Webster seized upon the opportunity. After denying any ill-intent towards South
Carolina, and seconding Hayne’s tribute to the Palmetto State, Webster was able to recast
the nullifier’s chivalrous display of self-defense as an unprovoked call to war on a sister
state: “Carried the war into the enemy’s country!...It is an invasion of this sort, that he
flatters himself with the expectation of gaining laurels fit to adorn a Senator’s brow!”81
Capitalizing on Hayne’s quest for war, Webster declared: “If the gentleman wishes to
increase his stores of party abuse and frothy violence; if he has a determined proclivity to
such pursuits; there are treasures of that sort south of the Potomac, much to his taste, yet
80
81
Barnwell, 45.
Register of Debates in Congress, 21 Cong., 1 Sess., 70.
38
untouched; I shall not touch them.”82 Hayne’s chivalric posture was monumentally
helpful as Webster painted a vivid illustration of nullification unavoidably leading to
“war—civil war.”83 More importantly, in terms of long-term consequences, the debate
between Hayne and Webster supplied the nation with evidence of South Carolina
hostility toward the rest of the nation, an element that would become central to the
nation’s perception of South Carolina.
Accusations of South Carolina’s intended hostility toward the other states emerged
shortly thereafter. During the nullification crisis, Georgia’s Governor Lumpkin candidly
gave his assessment of “the destructive heresies and acts of South Carolina”:
South Carolina…has openly assumed a position tending to disunion, and
has actually commenced the organization of a separate and distinct
government, based on belligerent and warlike principles. Her new form of
proposed government is not only founded on principles of hostility to her
old confederates, but is arbitrary, despotic and tyrannical in the extreme, to
all that own portion of her own citizens who have the honesty and
patriotism to dissent from her novel and wild career of revolution…84
Lumpkin’s remarks evince the antebellum perception of South Carolina truculence, and
reveal the success of Webster and others in attaching America’s greatest fears to
nullification. According to Lumpkin, South Carolina was simultaneously the champion
of lawless revolution and chaos, and “despotic and tyrannical in the extreme.” Robert J.
Breckinridge came to a similar conclusion in a sermon delivered over thirty years later:
We have already seen constitutional government…trampled under foot by
the convention of that State; and all the powers of sovereignty itself, both
ordinary and extraordinary, assumed by it in such a manner that life,
liberty and property have no more security in South Carolina than
82
Ibid, 70.
Ibid, 79.
84
As quoted by Richard E. Ellis, The Union at Risk: Jacksonian Democracy, States’ Rights and the Nullification Crisis
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 114.
83
39
anywhere under heaven where absolute despotism or absolute anarchy
prevails….85
According to Lumpkin and Breckinridge, South Carolina represented the exact opposite
of a balance between liberty and order.
In addition to the stigmas of anarchy and tyranny, the perception of South Carolina
belligerence survived the following three decades, and was re-articulated by the
Richmond Whig in January 1861:
We have never had a doubt that it was the deliberate purpose of South
Carolina, by some rash, illegal steps, to involve all her sister Southern
States in the calamity of Civil War. She is not content to be allowed to
go out of the Union peaceably. Her object is to “drag” other States
with her and involve them all in a common and terrible conflict with
the General Government.86
As Americans began to associate the Union with peace, harmony and order, South
Carolina began to embody the chief threat to their much-desired tranquility.87 A week
before South Carolina seceded, the New York Times published a letter from Henry J.
Raymond to William Lowndes Yancey, in which Raymond wrote of South Carolina:
“From the very outset she has been at war with the dominant ideas of the Confederacy.
She has done more to embroil the country in controversy, to disturb the public peace and
sow the seeds of disloyalty and strife than all the other States.”88 “The South
Carolinians,” reported another article, “never were willing to be considered a part of this
American nation—they were a nation by themselves. They hold that the world is
85
As quoted by Jon L. Wakelyn, ed., Southern Pamphlets on Secession, November 1860-April 1861 (Chapel Hill: The
University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 250.
86
As quoted by Donald E. Reynolds, Editors Make War: Southern Newspapers in the Secession Crisis (Carbondale, IL:
Southern Illinois University Press, 2006), 165.
87
See William R. Taylor, Cavalier & Yankee, p. 114, for more on the American appreciation of harmony.
88
New York Times, 13 Dec. 1860.
40
constituted of two peoples—South Carolinians and barbarians. If this war were over,
with the Confederacy triumphant to-morrow, we verily believe that South Carolina would
declare war against Georgia and North Carolina before the close of the week.”89
Hayne’s belligerence on behalf of South Carolina was matched in intensity by his
praise of South Carolina:
Never was there exhibited, in the history of the world, higher examples of
noble daring, dreadful suffering, and heroic endurance, than by the whigs
of Carolina, during that Revolution. The whole State, from the mountains
to the sea, was overrun by an overwhelming force of the enemy….The
“plains of Carolina” drank up the most precious blood of her
citizens!....Driven from their homes, into the gloomy and almost
impenetrable swamps, even there the spirit of liberty survived, and South
Carolina (sustained by the example of her Sumpters{sic} and her Marions)
proved by her conduct, that, though her soil might be overrun, the spirit of
her people was invincible.90
Contrasted with the ostensible humility of Webster, this expression exemplified the
arrogance and conceit South Carolinians became synonymous with. One southern pastor
lamented “all the possible and all the imaginable arrogance of South Carolina” from his
pulpit.91 The Wilmington Daily Herald refused to be “dragged into revolution and
anarchy,” to please South Carolina, “who, by her insufferable arrogance, and conceited
importance, has been a source of annoyance and disquietude to the whole country, North
and South, for the last thirty years.”92 North Carolina Whig James Johnston Pettigrew
bemoaned his impending “sojourn in a state of disunionists and conceited fellows.”93
“Her arrogance and rashness have arrayed even her Southern neighbors against her,”
89
New York Times, 19 Apr. 1863.
Register of Debates in Congress, 21 Cong., 1 Sess., 50.
91
As quoted by Wakelyn, 252.
92
As quoted by Charles Edward Cauthen, South Carolina Goes to War, 1861-1865 (Columbia: University of South
Carolina Press, 1950, 2005), 30.
93
As quoted by Barnwell, 47.
90
41
wrote a Virginian. “She will not be supported by a single State. I have not heard a voice
raised in her behalf.”94 The New York Times similarly spoke of “the insolent vanity of
South Carolina,” and “the already stupendous vanity of the South Carolina chivalry,”
before predicting the State’s unavoidable doom: “And with its subjugation will tumble
down the pride and arrogance of the vainest and meanest brood of traitors on this
continent.”95
Furthermore, Hayne’s abandonment of the West in order to defend and praise South
Carolina, his opposition to support public works in other states, South Carolina’s flip-flop
on internal improvements, and his attack on Massachusetts worked in conjunction with
his apparent display of arrogance to foster the image of South Carolina selfishness.
Philip Hone later described South Carolinians as “the most clannish, selfish people in
America. They have no affection for anything except South Carolina.”96 Another
northerner wrote, “It is the one State where hatred to the Union, the Constitution, and the
laws has infected nearly the whole population. With characteristic selfishness, the South
Carolinians from the very beginning of the rebellion, showed their anxiety and
determination…to keep the war out of their borders.”97
Another element influencing Webster’s success in the debate was the unique political
culture of South Carolina. Confronted with the rising tide of egalitarianism, South
Carolina resisted some of the reforms that swept across the rest of the nation. Although
South Carolina was the first State to legalize universal white male suffrage, it was also
94
“Personal Recollections of the War,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 33, No. 193 (June 1866), 2.
New York Times, 19 Apr. 1863.
96
Philip Hone, The Diary of Philip Hone, 1828-1851 (New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1910), 53.
97
George Whitfield Pepper, Personal Recollections of Sherman’s Campaigns: In Georgia and the Carolinas
(Zanesville, Ohio: Hugh Dunne, 1866), 298.
95
42
the last state to allow its voting populace to directly choose their presidential electors. By
1832, South Carolina alone required its legislature to vote for president. In the age of
Jacksonian Democracy, such practices bore the stench of the Old World and were offputting to many Americans. This worked to Webster’s advantage as he spoke of a
government of the people. Hayne, as the representative of South Carolina, provided the
appropriate antithesis, and the contrast between them helped engender the perception of
South Carolina as antidemocratic. Decades later, the New York Times traced this history
back to colonial South Carolina: “Having the least democratic government, South
Carolina was almost from the first distinguished as the worst governed, most
insubordinate, and most licentious and immoral of all the English settlements in
America….”98 Frederick Law Olmsted described South Carolinians as having a
“profound contempt for everything foreign except despotism” and a “scornful hatred
especially for all honestly democratic States.”99 “There is, in that State,” one southerner
concurred, “an ancient and fixed opposition to a government by the people. They have
an early prejudice against this thing called democracy.”100 In addition to alienating the
State, this also helped augment South Carolina’s reputation for despotism and selfishness.
Throughout the antebellum period, South Carolinians would be referred to as
“monarchists” and “aristocrats.”101 George Templeton Strong revealed a degree of
98
New York Times, 17 Jun. 1861.
As quoted by Grant, 81.
100
As quoted by Wakelyn, 310.
101
New York Times, 1 Jul. 1861;
99
43
personal pride when he wrote: “I belong to the insurgent plebians of the North arming
against a two penny South Carolina aristocracy.”102
While a reputation for belligerence, anarchy, despotism, arrogance and selfishness
did little to help South Carolina’s case for inclusion in an American national identity, the
most important, and damaging, stigma resulting from the Great Debate was that of South
Carolina disunionism. By equating the South Carolina doctrine of state interposition with
disunion, Webster helped engender the image of South Carolina being committed to
disunion for the sake of disunion. This perception gained ascendancy during the
nullification movement and persisted up until the Civil War. In a letter to Joel R. Poinsett
of South Carolina, President Andrew Jackson expressed his desire to “unite the whole
people against the nullifiers, & instead of carrying the South with the nullies, will have
the effect to arouse them against them when it is discovered their object is nothing but
disunion.”103 He carried through with this plan, proclaiming in his Nullification
Proclamation: “Their object is disunion. But do not be deceived by names. Disunion by
armed force is treason.”104 “It cannot be too strongly impressed on the public mind,”
wrote Amos Kendall, “that the avowed object of South Carolina is not a redress of
Southern grievances, but the final and irretrievable destruction of the Union....”105 In an
era when Americans were crafting their national identity upon the central concept of a
union for the sake of union, nothing could be more un-American than the idea of disunion
102
as quoted by William E. Geinapp, The Origins of the Republican Party, 1852-1856 (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1987), 360.
103
Andrew Jackson to Joel R. Poinsett, 24 January 1833, quoted by Charles J. Stille, “The Life and Services of Joel R.
Poinsett,” The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, vol. 12, no.2, 287.
104
Andrew Jackson, “Nullification Proclamation,” Dec. 10, 1832, in Henry L. Watson, ed., Andrew Jackson vs. Henry
Clay: Democracy and Development in Antebellum America (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 1998), 208.
105
Amos Kendall, William Stickney, ed., Autobiography of Amos Kendall (Boston: Lee and Shepard, 1872), 618.
44
for the sake of disunion.
Years later, Henry Clay reaffirmed Jackson’s assertion, “From developments now
being made in South Carolina, it is perfectly manifest that a party exists in that state
seeking a dissolution of the Union, and for that purpose employing the pretext of the
rejection of Mr. Tyler’s abominable treaty.”106 The responses to South Carolina’s
secession in 1860 are evidence of Andrew Jackson’s success at sustaining his claims.
“South Carolina rejoiced over the election of Lincoln,” Isaac Newton Arnold later wrote,
“with bonfires and processions. His election furnished a pretext for rebellion. A
conspiracy had existed since the days of nullification, to seize upon the first favorable
opportunity to break up the Union.”107 Over a month before South Carolina seceded, the
New York Times hinted at the conceivable future with a reflection on South Carolina’s
past:
It was not so much any particular grievance under the Union that she
resented, as the very theory of the Union, regarded as a bond of restraint.
Her hostility to it had been the most active element in her for a
generation—had fermented in every vein, and rankled in every tissue. It
was a feeling that had its origin in the loftiest sentiments and finest
sensibilities,…108
After formally seceding, South Carolina waited upon the other southern states to imitate
her course of action, while the Freeman’s Journal failed to recognize the ingenuity of
South Carolina’s behavior: “Disunion for the sake of disunion rules the day there.”109
At a time when the vast majority of Americans could comprehend no reasonable
106
Henry Clay to Stephen Miller, 1 July 1844, in Melba Porter Hay, ed., The Papers of Henry Clay (Lexington: The
University Press of Kentucky, 1991), 10: 79.
107
Isaac Newton Arnold, The Life of Abraham Lincoln (Chicago: Jansen, McClurg & Company, 1885), 172.
108
New York Times, 13 Nov. 1860
109
as quoted by Paul J. Foik, Pioneer Catholic Journalism, vol. 12 (New York: United States Catholic Historical
Society, 1930), 12: 203.
45
stimulus for disunion, South Carolina’s regional and national influence became stagnant
in light of the stigma of disunionism. The calculating devotion of South Carolina,
alluded to by Webster, remained a prevalent perception across the South. Declining an
invitation to a Southern Convention in 1850, the Virginia General Assembly expressed its
belief that such a convention was “calculated to destroy the integrity of this Union.”110
Up until 1861, South Carolina was unable to organize a united southern resistance, to
counter the growing threats to slavery and southern institutions, because of the South’s
hesitancy to follow the lead of disunionists. Manisha Sinha clarifies: “accusations that
the southern movement was merely an old Carolinian ruse for disunion undercut the
strength of secessionists.”111 Furthermore, while not specifically preventing it, the
association of South Carolina with disunion undercut South Carolina’s ability to seek
inclusion in the emerging national identity.
At a time when the ability of South Carolinians to influence the nation, or at the very
least the South, was crucial to protect their future, this preventive brick wall laid by
Webster was especially frustrating. The bleak circumstances transforming their state had
already introduced an unusual degree of sensitivity, ushering in an “atmosphere of
injured pride, poverty, and resentment.” 112 When Webster criticized the loyalty of South
Carolina, he added insult to injury. By questioning South Carolinians’ motives and their
nature, Webster undermined their credibility and rendered them politically impotent.
This impotence left them unable to prevent the isolation and exclusion of South Carolina
110
As quoted by Avery Craven, The Coming of the Civil War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957), 265.
Manisha Sinha, The Counterrevolution of Slavery: Politics and Ideology in Antebellum South Carolina (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 106.
112
Quoted by James Haw, “ ‘The Problem of South Carolina’ Reexamined: A Review Essay,” The South Carolina
Historical Magazine, vol. 107, no. 1 (Jan. 2006), 11.
111
46
from the national narrative. When Hayne and Webster sparred over the histories of their
states, it was merely the harbinger of a long and bitter series of indictments.
Although Webster had provided a means, however impractical, for the inclusion of
South Carolinians in his construction of American identity, he subtly laid the groundwork
for a more expansive exclusion in his second reply to Hayne: “[Hayne] traced the flow of
Federal blood down through successive ages and centuries, till he brought it into the
veins of American Tories, of whom, by the way, there were twenty in the Carolinas for
one in Massachusetts.”113 Here Webster planted a future seed of disunion. Having
already isolated South Carolina’s politics from the rest of the nation, Webster took the
next step and began the process of excluding South Carolina from the nation’s unifying
historical experience. This slight, a forgotten whisper from a perpetually remembered
oration, was one of the earliest examples of the northern interpretation of American
history.
In the wake of the Nullification Crisis, Rufus Choate advocated the production of an
American literature, “a treasure of common ancestral recollections,” immortalizing the
colonial period and the American Revolution. Choate hoped such a literature would help
preserve the Union: “reminded of our fathers, we should remember that we are
brethren.”114 Such a literature did begin to emerge, and when Webster mentioned the
ratio of South Carolina and Massachusetts Tories, he gave credit to a topic that would
become a dominant theme of that emerging literature. Americans would be reminded of
113
114
Register of Debates in Congress, 21 Cong., 1 Sess., 71.
as quoted by Matthews, 196-198.
47
their fathers, but Choate’s prediction was wrong. Rather than help them remember that
they were brethren, their reminiscence did the exact opposite.
48
CHAPTER TWO
DUELING PENS: THE SABINE-SIMMS CONTROVERSY
“It was a strange spectacle indeed. Here were two sections that were virtually at
war with each other in the 1850s, not merely over the current problems that
beset them but also over their comparative strengths and weaknesses during the
War for Independence.”115
“Yet the first shaft at South Carolina comes from the quiver of Massachusetts,”
decried William Gilmore Simms as he delivered a lecture in New York City in the
Autumn of 1856.116 Objecting to what he believed was an unfair critique of his native
state, Simms crafted a defense of South Carolina’s past, complementary to the earlier one
made by Robert Hayne. And with it, the battle Hayne had waged in the political arena
was carried into the intellectual sphere, in an exchange that would later be dubbed the
Sabine-Simms Controversy.
*****
On October 4th, 1860, John W. Palmer of Unionville, South Carolina wrote a
letter to William Gannaway Brownlow, editor of the Knoxville Whig, requesting to have
his subscription to the Whig canceled on the grounds that Brownlow was “a traitor to the
South.” Brownlow responded with a brief recounting of American history, presenting an
historical narrative in which South Carolina had been the home of traitors, and the
115
John Hope Franklin, “The North, the South, and the American Revolution,” The Journal of American History, 62,
no.1 (June 1975), 17.
116
William Gilmore Simms, “South Carolina in the Revolution: A Lecture,” The Letters of William Gilmore Simms,
Volume Three: 1850-1857, Mary Simms Oliphant, Alfred Taylor Odell, and T.C. Duncan Eaves, eds. (Columbia:
University of South Carolina Press, 1954), 526.
49
descendants of traitors, since the birth of the American Republic.117 Months later, when
South Carolina seceded from the Union, the national reaction to the inaugural secession
revealed Brownlow was not alone in his conception of American history. Like countless
other Americans, Brownlow’s narrative of American history was the product of an
evolving interpretation of the past introduced thirteen years earlier by Lorenzo Sabine.
When Lorenzo Sabine published his The American Loyalists in 1847, it was “the
first ambitious and comprehensive study” of Tories in the American Revolution.118 It
was also representative of the increasing sectional disparity of his time. Sabine’s book
was couched in language vainglorious to the New Englander, provocative to the
Southerner. His criticisms of the southern states were counterbalanced with laudation of
the northern states. He argued that the larger populations of Virginia and North Carolina
fielded fewer troops than the smaller states of Connecticut, New Hampshire, and Rhode
Island: “with a population double that of New Hampshire, how did it happen that the
number of continental troops furnished by [North Carolina] was 5,223 less?”119
Furthermore, the recipient of Sabine’s most complimentary praise was Massachusetts,
where “the Revolution had its origin and the Old Bay State furnished a large part of the
men and the means [necessary] to carry it forward to a successful issue.”120 Sabine’s
lavish praise of Massachusetts was counterbalanced with his biting censure of South
Carolina: “The public men of South Carolina of the present generation, claim that her
117
William Gannaway Brownlow, Sketches of the Rise, Progress, and Decline of Secession; with a Narrative of
Personal Adventures among the Rebels (Philadelphia: Applegate & Co., 1862), 65-74.
118
John Hope Franklin, “The North, the South, and the American Revolution,” The Journal of American History, 62,
no.1 (June 1975), 8.
119
As quoted by William L. Welch, “Lorenzo Sabine and the Assault on Sumner,” The New England Quarterly, Vol.
65, No. 2 (Jun., 1992), 299.
120
Ibid, 299.
50
patriotic devotion in the Revolution was inferior to none, and was superior to most of the
States of the Confederacy,” he charged. “As I have examined the evidence, it was not
so.”121 Directing more criticism at South Carolina than any other state, Sabine’s history
was both an extrapolation of Daniel Webster’s Reply to Hayne and the predecessor to
Charles Sumner’s “Crime against Kansas.” As such, Sabine’s book was largely
disagreeable to many white South Carolinians.
The American Loyalists was particularly successful at ruffling the feathers of
William Gilmore Simms, South Carolina’s historian laureate and “the leading southern
interpreter of the Revolution.”122 After reading Sabine’s book, Simms fervently
retaliated with a two-part book review published in the Southern Quarterly Review.
Simms attributed Sabine’s criticisms to a recurrent Yankee flaw, being “diseased by
prejudice…a common misfortune with New England writers and New England
politicians.”123 It was a flaw, said Simms, that appeared so expansively and so habitually
that it must “be regarded with the indulgence shown cases of acknowledged infirmity and
chronic incapacity.”124 But Simms himself did not accept his prescribed indulgence. His
scathing reviews failed to appease his angst, and in the autumn of 1856 he left his home
in South Carolina to deliver a series of lectures throughout the North, hoping to vindicate
South Carolina’s role in the American Revolution. It was a short-lived mission. Simms
abandoned his lecture tour after his first lecture was received with hostility and apathy.
121
Lorenzo Sabine, Biographical Sketches of Loyalists of The American Revolution (Baltimore: Genealogical
Publishing Co., Inc., 1979), 40.
122
Sean R. Busick, A Sober Desire for History: William Gilmore Simms as Historian (Columbia: University of South
Carolina Press, 2005), xi.
123
as quoted by Welch, 300.
124
Ibid, 300-301.
51
Although Simms’s lectures did not fulfill their intended purpose, they, along with his
reviews and Sabine’s book, were the core of the Sabine-Simms Controversy.
Although South Carolina was not the only southern state criticized by Sabine, it
was the state he criticized most harshly, and it was the only state to direct substantial
attention to rebutting his version of the American Revolution. Thus, Sabine’s book,
rather than being merely a controversial interpretation of the past, became the catalyst of
a prolonged controversy and the continuation of the ancient rivalry between
Massachusetts and South Carolina. Throughout this controversy, the ancient rivalry
began to show signs of its evolution.
The Sabine-Simms Controversy forms the crux of this thesis, because it represents
the critical moment when Americans began to view South Carolina as experiencing and
occupying an historical narrative separate from their own. Lorenzo Sabine’s rendition of
the American Revolution, and his portrayal of South Carolina’s role in that event, was a
dramatic revision of American history. Whereas Daniel Webster had alienated a small
number of his South Carolina contemporaries by accusing them of selfish disloyalty to a
unifying past, Sabine alienated a majority of South Carolinians, claiming they had
inherited a past entirely different from that of other Americans. At a time when
antebellum Americans were acknowledging a growing contrast between South
Carolinians and themselves, Sabine introduced the perception of an equally stark contrast
existing between their ancestors. America’s acceptance of Sabine’s revision allowed the
country to believe South Carolina was historically juxtaposed against the rest of the
nation.
52
As a geographical entity, South Carolina’s significance in the American
Revolution was incontrovertible. More battles and skirmishes of that war were fought in
South Carolina than in any other colony, including some of the Americans’ more crucial
victories, such as Sullivan’s Island, Kings Mountain, and Cowpens. Sabine confronted
this directly, claiming: “The exact question is, then, not where were the battlegrounds of
the Revolution, but what was the proportion of men, which each of the thirteen States
supplied for the contest.”125 According to Sabine, the proportion of Whigs in the state
was easily eclipsed by an overwhelming number of Tories. South Carolina, he wrote,
“could not defend herself against her own Tories; and it is hardly an exaggeration to add,
that more Whigs of New England were sent to her aid, and now lie buried in her soil, than
she sent from it to every scene of strife from Lexington to Yorktown.”126 With this
claim, Sabine acknowledged South Carolina’s relevance as a critical arena of the
American Revolution, while giving New Englanders the credit for fighting in that arena.
If the American Revolution was the common struggle of thirteen American colonies
against the British Empire, Sabine crafted a narrative in which South Carolina’s
contributions were offset by its detractions; or, to put it in other terms, he created a
narrative in which South Carolina made virtually no measurable contribution to
American victory.
As Sabine continued his narrative, South Carolina seemed increasingly akin to an
enemy combatant:
125
Lorenzo Sabine, The American Loyalists, or Biographical Sketches of Adherents to the British Crown in the War of
the Revolution (Boston: Charles C. Little and James Brown, 1847), 31.
126
Ibid, 32.
53
South Carolina, with a Northern army to assist her, could not, or would
not, even preserve her own capital….its citizens did not rally to save it,
and Gen. Lincoln was compelled to accept terms of capitulation….the
inhabitants, as a body, preferred to return to their allegiances to the British
crown. The people, on whom Congress and Gen. Lincoln depended to
complete his force, refused to enlist under the Whig banner; but after the
surrender of the city, they flocked to the royal standard by hundreds. In a
word, so general was the defection, that persons who had enjoyed
Lincoln’s confidence joined the royal side….the whole State had yielded
submission to the royal arms, and had become again a part of the
empire.127
Here we see the continuation of a theme from Webster’s Reply to Hayne, via Sabine’s
implication that South Carolinians were fundamentally self-interested and unwilling to
help the other states whenever it became inconvenient or perilous to do so, and with an
underlying intimation that South Carolina’s unprovoked selfishness was ultimately
harmful to everyone else. More explicitly, by claiming the whole state again became part
of the British Empire during the middle of the conflict, Sabine paints the image of South
Carolinians as the historic enemies of Americans.
Lorenzo Sabine’s interpretation of American history was a marked departure
from conventional accounts, and his treatment of South Carolina, although not
entirely baseless, was a stark contrast from traditional histories such as Parson
Weems’s biography of Francis Marion. Following the close of the American
Revolution, Francis Marion, one of South Carolina’s famous guerilla patriots,
achieved a lofty level of national fame. Washington-biographer Mason Locke
Weems, enjoined by a public eager to learn more about another one of their young
country’s great heroes, published a biography of Francis Marion in 1824.
127
Ibid, 32.
54
Although the book claimed to be a biography of Marion, it was riddled with
anecdotes and mini-biographies that devoted a great deal of attention to the heroic
deeds and struggles of the numerous patriots surrounding Marion, familiarizing
the literate public with the names of many heroic Carolinians, such as the
sergeants Jasper, M’Donald, and Newton, Mrs. Elliot and Mrs. Jones, Col.
Laurens, General Horry, Captain Snipes and Rebecca Brewton Motte, among
others. According to Weems, Marion was but one of a vast array of American
patriots from South Carolina.128
While Lorenzo Sabine certainly didn’t deny the patriotism and merits of South
Carolinians such as Francis Marion, he did reevaluate what Marion represented. Sabine
didn’t deny Marion’s place in American history, he merely depicted him as a remarkable
exception rather than a representative example: “ ‘One swallow does not make a
summer,’ nor ‘One feather make a bed;’ and so, a Laurens, father and son, a Middleton, a
Rutledge, Marion, Sumter, and Pickens, do not prove that the Whig leaven was diffused
throughout the mass of her people.”129 According to Sabine, Francis Marion was both an
American patriot and a South Carolina anomaly.
In addition to depicting South Carolina’s Whig heroes as exceptions within the
state, Sabine isolated them from the larger body of American patriots based upon the
intensity and animosity existing between them and South Carolina Tories. Because of the
resulting atrocities, Sabine claimed, “the Whigs disgraced the cause and the American
128
Brig. Gen. P. Horry and Parson M. L. Weems, The Life of General Francis Marion: A Celebrated Partisan Officer,
in the Revolutionary War, Against the British and Tories in South Carolina and Georgia (Winston-Salem, NC: John F.
Blair Publisher, third printing, 2004).
129
Lorenzo Sabine, The American Loyalists or Biographical Sketches of Adherents to the British Crown in the War of
the Revolution (Boston, 1847), 30, 32, as quoted by Franklin, 9.
55
name.”130 Again Sabine’s narrative was a contradiction to Weems. Weems relayed a tale
of mutiny among Marion’s ranks, and Marion’s forgiving attitude toward both the
mutineer and the enemies:
…With such worthies by our sides, with such a CAUSE before our eyes,
let us move on with joy to the battle and charge like the honored
champions of God and of human rights. But, in the moment of victory, let
the supplicating enemy find us as lovely in mercy, as we are terrible in
valor. Our enemies are blind. They neither understand nor desire the
happiness of mankind. Ignorant, therefore, as children, they claim our pity
for themselves. And as to their widows and little ones, the very thought of
them should fill our souls with tenderness. The crib that contains their
corn, the cow that gives them milk, the cabin that shelters their feeble
heads from the storm, should be sacred in our eyes. Weak and helpless, as
they are, still they are the nurslings of heaven—our best intercessors with
the Almighty.131
Weems even goes on to describe the reaction to Marion’s epiloge: “The satisfaction
which it gave to the officers was so general and sincere, that I often heard them say
afterwards, that since the mutiny was suppressed, they were glad it happened; for it had
given them an opportunity to hear a lecture, which they hoped would make them better
men and braver soldiers too, as long as they lived.”132 Nor was Marion’s mercy an
isolated event. However terrible the conflicts between South Carolina Whigs and Tories
may have been, John Jay also testified to the humanity of South Carolina Whigs in their
treatment of Tories.133
Furthermore, Sabine’s narrative of New Englanders fighting the battles of South
Carolina was a direct contradiction to the history presented by Weems, who described the
130
Sabine, 42.
Weems, 140-41.
132
Ibid, 141.
133
See Gregg Singer, South Carolina in the Confederation (Philadelphia: Privately Printed, 1941), 121. Singer quotes
Jay, who wrote “Although much severity was naturally expected and would have been excusable in South Carolina
considering the manner in which she has been treated, yet great regard to justice and an uncommon degree of
benevolence, humanity, and mercy have marked her conduct toward her offending citizens.”
131
56
northern armies as abandoning Carolina: “Thus are all our hopes from the north entirely
at an end, and poor Carolina is left to shift for herself.”134 By no means does Weems
deny the overwhelming presence of South Carolina Tories, writing “not one in a thousand
of [South Carolina’s] own children will rise to take her part; but, on the contrary, are
madly taking part with the enemy against her.”135 But Weems differs from Sabine in the
credit he gives for the defeat of South Carolina’s Tories. According to Weems, Marion,
Sumter and South Carolina’s Whig minority, “fought and conquered for Carolina,” in
spite of the overwhelming Tory opposition and “the many follies and failures of northern
armies and generals.”136
Parson Weems’s history of the American Revolution was no more accurate than
Lorenzo Sabine’s. Neither were written primarily out of a need for historical accuracy,
but rather to service some national need. When Weems wrote his history in 1824, he was
doing so at a time when Americans wanted a unifying history of their country’s
beginnings. He was writing for a public that wanted South Carolina’s inclusion in the
national narrative. When Sabine wrote his version of the Revolution over two decades
later, he was writing for a very different public, with very different wants.
Whereas Weems acknowledged South Carolina Toryism in 1824, he did so in a
manner that facilitated South Carolina’s inclusion in a historical narrative alongside the
other twelve colonies, giving South Carolina’s Whig minority the credit for neutralizing
the state’s Tories and delivering devastating blows to the British, ultimately making a
critical contribution to the American cause. Sabine did the exact opposite. By giving
134
Weems, 101.
Ibid, 101.
136
Ibid, 115.
135
57
others credit for the American victories in South Carolina, by bringing South Carolina
Toryism into the spotlight, by making a distinction between South Carolinian and
American Whigs, and by treating Francis Marion as an exception, Sabine’s book sent a
latent message: South Carolina had ultimately fought against her sister colonies during
the country’s defining moment.
The differences between Weems’s account and Sabine’s represented a critical
shift in how Americans viewed their past. The remarks and perceptions of other
Americans, southerners as well as northerners, testify to the eventual success of Sabine’s
message. A decade later, Hinton Rowan Helper of North Carolina asked, “Is it not
notoriously true that the Toryism of South Carolina prolonged the [Revolution] two years
at least?”137 Massachusetts congressman Anson Burlingame even referenced Lorenzo
Sabine when he addressed the House of Representatives in 1856, contending “there is no
proof that [South Carolina militia units] were ever engaged in any battle.” According to
Burlingame, “few South Carolinians fought in the battles of Eutaw or Guilford. They
were chiefly fought by men out of South Carolina, and they would have won greater fame
and greater laurels if they had not been chiefly opposed by the citizens of the soil.”138
Henry Wilson of Massachusetts seconded these claims in the Senate:
…thousands and tens of thousands of [South Carolina’s] sons sought
protection under the British flag. When the army of Greene was starving,
the British army in Charleston was receiving all that the fertile valleys of
South Carolina could produce, carry into Charleston, and exchange for
British gold. When Greene and his patriot army wanted oxen and horses
to carry supplies, they were hustled off into the forest by people who had,
137
Hinton Rowan Helper, The Impending Crisis of the South: How to Meet It (New York: Burdick Brothers, 1857),
115.
138
Appendix to the Congressional Globe, 34 Cong., 1 Sess., 655.
58
to quote the words of General Barnwell, “far greater attachment to their
interests than zeal for the service of their country.”139
Captain Smith W. Fowler depicted a similar scenario, referring specifically to Charleston:
Far away, upon the Atlantic coast, there stands one of the oldest cities of
the Union. ‘Tis the only city in the nation where a British soldier found a
hearty and almost unanimous welcome, in the old Revolution for liberty.
‘Tis the city where the fires of Toryism have not gone out since the war
for Independence--….Down in South Carolina, away from the dwelling
place of patriots and patriotism….140
“There were more Tories,” insisted one Tennessee editor, “[in South Carolina] during the
Revolutionary War than in all the other States put together.”141
With regards to the impending sectional conflict, the implications of Sabine’s
message cannot be underestimated. For any collective body of people, a unifying
historical experience is crucial in establishing a common identity. James C. Cobb
describes the past as “the raw material, the virtual DNA-equivalent, from which a sense
of group identity must be constructed and by which it must be nurtured and sustained.”142
The function of history, in its relationship to group identities, is not limited merely to the
role of establishing such identities. History also serves as the means by which such
identities are “nurtured and sustained.” History maintains a constant presence whenever
a collective identity is being defined and clarified. This is equally applicable to national
bodies, as another historian points out, “all nations rely on the past, or on some version of
139
New York Daily Times, 23 Jun. 1856.
Smith W. Fowler, Autobiographical Sketch of Capt. S. W. Fowler, Late of the 6th Mich. Inft’y (Manistee, MI: Times
and Standard Steam Power Print, 1877), 20.
141
Brownlow, 22.
142
James C. Cobb, “An Epitaph for the North: Reflections on the Politics of Regional and National Identity at the
Millennium,” The Journal of Southern History, vol. 66, no. 1 (Feb., 2000), 22, accessed in JSTOR, 25 Sep. 2006.
140
59
the past, for national definition.”143 Identities are rooted in the past, and nineteenth
century American identity was rooted in the American Revolution, the common plight of
the people of thirteen sister colonies. Taking particular pains to exclude South Carolina
from America’s historical narrative, Lorenzo Sabine redefined American identity when
he recast the American Revolution as the common struggle of the people of twelve
colonies. Sabine’s history was tantamount to South Carolina’s exclusion from American
identity. In doing so, he stripped the majority of South Carolinians of their identity,
forcing them to first seek inclusion, and, after failing, forge a new identity. At the same
time, he induced all other Americans to recognize a new national identity, one whose
historic bearings afforded no room for the people of South Carolina.
Faced with the threat of exclusion from the American historic narrative, South
Carolinians began to display a greater sense of historical awareness, which manifested
itself in the growing need to assert their voice in the historical record. Throughout the
first decades of America’s existence as an independent country, South Carolinians, like
most southerners, remained largely negligent of recording American history, leaving
historical writing and interpretation to be dominated by northern scholars and writers. In
an era of more harmonious sectional relations, this was neither contentious nor
objectionable, and “southerners seemed content with the desultory pursuit of
Revolutionary history largely by northern writers.”144 However, notes Eileen Ka-May
Cheng, with the escalation of sectional tensions, regional biases began to poison multiregional histories, “as George Bancroft and his New England colleagues gave a distinctly
143
Susan-Mary Grant, North over South: Northern Nationalism and American Identity in the Antebellum Era
(Lawrence: University of Kansas Press), 56.
144
Franklin, 7.
60
sectional cast to their interpretation of American history.”145 According to Susan-Mary
Grant, “nineteenth-century northerners rarely missed an opportunity to make sectional
capital out of the national past.”146 Lorenzo Sabine’s The American Loyalists was one of
a number of New England historians transcribing American history from a northern
perspective. Without a substantial body of southern writings to oppose or contradict
them, New Englanders could redefine American history to serve narrow sectional
agendas, virtually unchecked. But as soon as they began to redefine American history via
the exclusion of South Carolina, South Carolinians began to foster an active interest in
recording America’s past, making sure their presence was acknowledged.
Throughout the 1840s and 50s, a number of South Carolina’s intellectuals began
to advocate increased emphasis on South Carolina’s unique role in American history.
Delivering the inaugural address to the South Carolina Historical Society in 1855,
Frederick A. Porcher lamented their previous negligence:
Fellow citizens, the people of the South have in many respects been false
to themselves, and in none more than this, that utterly regardless of their
own past, they have consented to receive instructions from others, and
under interested teachers their history has been falsified. What child has
not been taught to believe rigorously that all that is good, all that is noble,
all that is venerable in our country is derived from the Puritan who landed
on the rock of Plymouth?147
In addition to what was said in this inaugural address, the date of the inaugural address
itself is pertinent. Whereas most states had begun forming state historical societies in the
1820s and 30s, South Carolina was a relative latecomer. Postdating the establishment of
145
Eileen Ka-May Cheng, “American Historical Writers and the Loyalists, 1788-1856: Dissent, Concensus, and
American Nationality,” Journal of the Early Republic, vol. 23, no. 4 (Winter, 2003), 512.
146
Grant, 28.
147
As quoted by Paul D. H. Quigley, “ ‘That History is Truly the Life of Nations:’ History and Southern Nationalism in
Antebellum South Carolina,” The South Carolina Historical Magazine, vol. 106, no. 1(Jan., 2005), 8.
61
other state historical societies by over two decades, the South Carolina Historical Society
did not enter the scene until the history of South Carolina became jeopardized. Similarly,
July 4th celebrations had been a common annual occurrence in Charleston during the
1820s and 30s. The 1850s witnessed the emergence of Palmetto Day as a viable and
widely accepted commemoration in South Carolina, and an alternative to the July 4th
celebrations of previous decades.148 As South Carolina’s relevance in Revolutionary
history was being altered on a national scale, South Carolinians developed a self-centered
perspective of American history. Three years after Porcher’s inaugural address, William
Porcher Miles implored his fellow Carolinians to “cherish…the recollection of our
revolutionary glory as the highest and purest in all our past record….”149
Perhaps no event pinpoints this transition better than the sentiments of William
Gilmore Simms. As late as 1843, Simms, delivering a July 4th oration, informed his
Aiken audience that South Carolina’s Revolutionary history did not need to be written
down, because it was “deeply engraven upon the everlasting monuments of the nation. It
is around us, a living trophy upon all our hills. It is within us, an undying memory in all
our hearts. It is a record which no fortune can obliterate—inseparable from all that is
great and glorious in the work of the Revolution.”150 And as late as 1845 he remained a
proponent of the development of a national literature and a national history.151 It wasn’t
until after Sabine’s history of the American Revolution questioned South Carolina’s
148
Kevin M. Gannon, “ ‘The Sabbath of Liberty’: The Invention of Palmetto Day in 1850s Charleston,” delivered at the
annual meeting of SHEAR [Lexington, KY], July, 1999, http://www.h-net.org/~shear/s99abs/KevinGannon.htm
149
As quoted by Franklin, 16.
150
Ibid, 11-12.
151
John W. Higham, “The Changing Loyalties of William Gilmore Simms,” The Journal of Southern History, vol. 9,
no. 2 (May, 1943), 221, in JSTOR [database online]; accessed 20 June 2007.
62
“deeply engraven” place in American history that Simms, and other South Carolinians,
began devoting greater attention to South Carolina’s particular relevance in the American
Revolution.
These South Carolinians began to produce a body of works designed to solidify
South Carolina’s place in American history by explicitly emphasizing the historic
contributions of South Carolina. Simms’s lecture on South Carolina in the American
Revolution is a perfect example of this. In an attempt to stress South Carolina’s inclusion
in America’s historic narrative, Simms asked:
How happens it that South Carolina is identified with so many glorious
passages in our history;--with so many of the brightest deeds;--with so
many fields of battle;--with so many names of deathless men, which, in
the National records, are the recognized representatives of the noblest
heroism—in fact, the received models of heroism whenever the song or
story of the Revolution is the subject? How is it that she has acquired a
spurious military and patriotic reputation, so distinguished in spite of the
chronicle? How is it that it has been left to the present day to make
discoveries of her shortcomings in the past, of which the Past, itself, knew
nothing?152
The final sentence in this quote reveals what Simms’s was specifically reacting to--the
present day emergence of a historic narrative which emphasized South Carolina’s
heretofore undiscovered “shortcomings.”
The whole tone of Simms’s lecture conveys an underlying agenda to convince the
North that South Carolina occupied an unequivocal place in American history. “Her
merit,” Simms argued, “consists in being able, while contending with a formidable home
faction, to make contributions of strength, wisdom, patriotism & valour, to the Common
Cause, which no other State in the Union has ever exceeded, tho’ placed under
152
Simms, “South Carolina in the Revolution: A Lecture,” 522.
63
circumstances far more advantageous!”153 Presented with a version of American history
in which South Carolina’s presence was either marginally important or important only as
an antithesis to the rest of the nation, William Gilmore Simms labored to produce a South
Carolina-centric version of American history.
In a way, Simms and the others were overcompensating for their previous
negligence. In doing so, they created a uniquely South Carolinian interpretation of
American history. This interpretation of the past has since become a subject of
examination by historians such as Paul D. H. Quigley. Pointing out the relationship
between history and nationalism, Quigley concluded that South Carolina’s
reinterpretation of American history was evidence of a deliberate and cognizant attempt
to construct a separate southern nationalism:
Recovering the character of this relationship between history and nation
clarifies some of the central ideological and cultural assumptions that
lay behind secession. It reveals that a small group of southern
intellectuals had spent a great deal of time before the war carefully
considering the meanings and implications of southern independence,
constructing an extensive intellectual scaffolding for the new nation
within the historical contexts of southern, American, and world
history.154
Because the writings of William Gilmore Simms, William Henry Trescot, Frederick
Porcher and others emphasized the uniqueness of South Carolina history, culture and
nature, Quigley points to their works to support his argument. “Trescot and Porcher,” he
writes, “attempted to establish southern nationalism as fact by crafting a unified narrative
of southern history. This has been a common nationalist technique.”155 Quigley is
153
Ibid, 529-530.
Quigley, 10-11.
155
Ibid, 15.
154
64
correct in identifying this as a common nationalist technique, but the presence of a
common nationalist technique is not irrefutable proof of deliberate nationalist activity.
Quigley’s interpretation has a sufficient amount of evidence to substantiate his
claims. It does, however, overlook a considerable amount of evidence that might be
deemed contradictory to his thesis. There is plenty of information to suggest that South
Carolina’s unique interpretation of the American Revolution was not an unprovoked plot
motivated by sectional or political imperatives. Simms’s lecture implies his primary
objective was to refute Sabine’s accusations in an appeal for inclusion, rather than
deliberately crafting the “intellectual scaffolding” that would validate South Carolina’s
exclusion:
South Carolina asks only to be tried by the standards which are applied to
other States. She asks no favour, but she demands justice. She requires,
that, while you expose her faults, you do not suppress her virtues. Be sure
of this, that if there be stains upon her shield, they are of virgin whiteness
in comparison with those, which a diligent delver in the sewers of history,
may discover, on many others, which now most loudly vaunt their
purity!156
The whole tone of Simms’s lecture carries the allusion of an objection to preceding
charges. “South Carolina, asserting abstract principles, rather than present necessities,”
Simms insisted, “raised the banner of Revolution in sympathy with Massachusetts—
raised it among the first—nay, the very first, and sent their succours to Massachusetts,
from the first moment when she was stricken by the enemy. Yet the first shaft at South
Carolina comes from the quiver of Massachusetts.”157 The “shaft” Simms was referring
156
157
Simms, “South Carolina in the Revolution: A Lecture,” 524.
Ibid, 526.
65
to was Sabine’s book, and this quote implies Simms was trying to attach South Carolina
to the history of Massachusetts and America, rather than separate from it.
We can also presume Simms’s intentions based upon how he depicts South Carolina:
I contend that purer patriots were never found—that hands cleaner of self
and of offense—freer from the reproach of base and selfish motive,--never
grasped the weapons of war—never more bravely, or faithfully carried
life, property & sacred honour, as their pledges into the field, or of more
generous and national purposes.158
His insistent declarations of South Carolina’s selflessness were a direct protest to
Sabine’s allusion to South Carolina selfishness. In this regard, his reaction was very
similar to Hayne’s. Both men struggled to prevent the perception of South Carolina as
primarily self-serving and introverted. Their concern with how South Carolina was
perceived by the rest of the nation reaffirms the argument that they were seeking
inclusion rather than exclusion.
In his private correspondence, Simms was explicit in outlining his motives and
intentions for going North, and his reasoning for focusing on South Carolina’s role in the
Revolution. When James Henry Hammond asked “what demon possessed”159 Simms to
go North to deliver a series of lectures on South Carolina, Simms responded:
I gave the true history, of S. C. and referred to other regions only where it
was necessary to establish a just standard by which to judge of what ought
to be expected of S. C. in the Revolution….I had to do this, in order to
show why, & on what points, I had undertaken to correct the vulgar
mistakes or misrepresentations of her history.160
Simms similarly explained his actions to Lorenzo Sabine, writing: “You assailed my
country, as I thought, & still think, unjustly, and in a bad temper: and I defended her, as
158
Ibid, 527.
James Henry Hammond to William Gilmore Simms, Nov. 27, 1856, The Letters of William Gilmore Simms, 3: 465n.
160
William Gilmore Simms to James Henry Hammond, Dec. 8, 1856, The Letters of William Gilmore Simms, 3: 466.
159
66
well as I could.”161 Thus, in a private letter to one of his closest friends, and in another
letter to his avowed adversary, Simms disclosed his primary intention: to correct the
mistakes regarding South Carolina’s history. His earlier concern for a national history
had been supplanted with a dedication to South Carolina’s history, because South
Carolina’s history was under attack by historians from other parts of the nation. Political
and sectional motivations played a negligible role in his action.
Furthermore, through this series of letters, both Hammond and Simms reveal that
Simms did what he did on behalf of South Carolina, not the South or the nation.
Recognizing Simms’s motives, Hammond rebuked him for having “martyred” himself
“for So Ca, who will not even buy your books.”162 Simms rejoined:
You are right in saying that S. C. had no claim of self-sacrifice upon me.
But, mon ami, neither you nor I,--are quite capable, whatever the wrongs
or neglect we suffer—to contemn, discard, or escape from our own
impulses. My heart (suffer me to have one) was slavishly in these topics
of S. C. I could no more fling them off from it, than I could fly. And my
mind followed my heart. In this field, I was the champion, and my
heroism did not stop to ask whether I should ever win thanks or a smile
from the disdainful sovereign whom I was prepared to serve with my life.
Do not you reproach me with this weakness, in which I could not suffer a
selfishness to share. I expect nothing from S. C., but I have been too long
accustomed to toils & sacrifice for her, to feel her injustice now.163
Based upon the explanation provided to Hammond, Simms was compelled to defend
South Carolina’s honor and vindicate her history.
Even in his fictional works, Simms conveys a motive of vindication. In Katherine
Walton, one of Simms’s first fictional works written after the publication of Sabine’s The
161
As quoted by Cheng, 512.
James Henry Hammond to William Gilmore Simms, Nov. 27, 1856, The Letters of William Gilmore Simms, 3:465n.
163
William Gilmore Simms to James Henry Hammond, Dec. 8, 1856, ibid, 3:468-469.
162
67
American Loyalists, General Andrew Williamson, a Whig-turned-Tory, justifies his
shifting allegiance:
As God is my judge…I never deserted [the cause] until it had deserted me!
My officers recommended the protection—our troops were scattered—we
had no army left. Beaufort was cut to pieces—our cavalry dispersed—
Congress would, or could, do nothing for us—and, in despair of any
success or safety, not knowing where to turn, I signed the accursed
instrument which…offered us a position of neutrality, when it was no
longer possible to offer defense.164
One can’t help but wonder if this passage contains an allegorical subtext justifying the
Tories of South Carolina, especially the citizens of Charleston who, according to Sabine,
“flocked to the royal standard by hundreds” after the surrender of the city. Perhaps this
passage even contains a more fascinating subtext. Perhaps Simms, the unionist-turnedsecessionist, was vindicating his own personal shift in allegiance, indicting the Union for
abandoning (by way of exclusion) South Carolina.
Additionally, many of the quotes Quigley uses to support his thesis are revealing
when analyzed in relation to preceding northern statements. Among the representative
examples he provides was Simms, who did “not fear but that the deeds and sacrifices of
Carolina, and of the whole South, will bear honorable comparison with those of any part
of this nation.”165 Andrew Butler and Lawrence Keitt were even more specific.
According to Butler, “South Carolina has poured out hogsheads of blood where gallons
have been poured out by Massachusetts.”166 Similarly, Keitt claimed “Massachusetts
embarked in the Revolution for water-falls, spindles, and merchant craft; South Carolina
164
as quoted by William R. Taylor, Cavalier & Yankee: The Old South and American National Character (New York:
Harper & Row, Publishers, 1969), 283.
165
As quoted by Quigley, 29-30.
166
Ibid, 30.
68
engaged in it for the royalty of mind.”167 Quigley references these quotes as evidence of
South Carolina’s immoderate behavior. Referring to Simms’ reaction to Sabine, Quigley
writes: “Once again, a radical South Carolinian had taken a strand of moderate southern
thought and steered it in an extremist, sectional direction.”168 Quigley’s analysis is
speculative and inconclusive. Although the quotes he mentions, and others like them, are
good examples of the sectionalized nature of South Carolina’s interpretation of the past,
they must be framed within a larger context in order to understand their motivation and
meaning.
Oftentimes, quotes such as those referenced by Quigley came on the heels of
antagonistic statements made by Sabine and others. “Massachusetts furnished more men
in the Revolution than the whole South…and more by ten-fold than South Carolina,”
declared Anson Burlingame of Massachusetts in June of 1856. “More New England men
now lie buried in the soil of South Carolina than there were of South Carolinians, who
left their State to fight the battles of the country.”169 Therefore Andrew Butler’s remark
about South Carolina pouring out hogsheads of blood in comparison with
Massachusetts’s gallons, made in August 1856, could’ve easily been a rebuttal to
Burlingame’s statement. The same is applicable to the many remarks Simms made,
regarding Massachusetts, during his lecture. As they focused on American history, South
Carolinians specifically mentioned Massachusetts time and time again because
Massachusetts had been previously mentioned in direct contrast to South Carolina.
Given the large number of disparaging remarks directed toward South Carolina, the
167
Ibid, 30-31.
Ibid, 29.
169
As quoted by Franklin, 16.
168
69
“unique South Carolina invocation and reinterpretation” of American history takes on a
new form in light of these critiques.
Finally, we in the historical field are forced to come to grips with the main subject
matter that characterizes Simms’s lecture, “South Carolina in the American Revolution,”
and the parameters in which it was delivered. If Simms was primarily concerned with the
construction of a separate southern nation, why did he focus on the history of South
Carolina instead of a unifying history of the South in the American Revolution? Why did
he and others single out Massachusetts time after time, instead of the North in general?
Why did he go on a northern lecture tour instead of a Southern lecture tour? Why would
he care about the opinions of northerners as he prepared to form a new nation? Why
would he try to convince them South Carolina occupied a place in their past? One
explanation can answer all these questions: William Gilmore Simms, and the other South
Carolinians who produced works on South Carolina’s history, were not seeking the
construction of a historical narrative to support a separate southern nation; they were
seeking a historical narrative that would secure South Carolina’s permanent inclusion in
the national narrative of the United States. They focused on South Carolina because their
behavior was primarily defensive, and they focused on Massachusetts because, more
often than not, the condemnations of South Carolina came from Massachusetts. And
Simms went on a northern lecture tour in a desperate attempt to prevent South Carolina’s
exclusion from American identity.
Unfortunately for Simms, he was too late. Webster and Sabine had done their job
so thoroughly and successfully, that when Simms arrived in the North intending to
70
enlighten his misinformed compatriots, he was instead met by a group of Americans who
had developed a predisposition to view him as the representative of a society wholly at
odds with their own. His pleas fell on the ears of a people who had, by 1856, already
come to the conclusion that he, a South Carolinian, was an outsider. “With an impudence
unsurpassed,” harangued Buffalo’s Morning Express, “he comes into our midst and
makes an harangue abusive of a Northern State and running over with fulsome and false
praise of the least deserving State of the Union.”170 There are two elements of this
critique deserving of attention. The first is the line “he comes into our midst,” a line
conveying an image of Simms as an outsider, an alien, an unwelcome intruder invading
“our” space. The second is the reference to South Carolina as “the least deserving State
of the Union.” The latter reveals this reporter’s perception of South Carolina. Simms
delivered his lecture hoping his audience would recognize South Carolina’s place in
America’s past, only to find his audience viewed his entreaty as an affront.
Northerners had no interest in the history of their rival, and immediately
dismissed him with an ominous foreboding: “Damn South Carolina & all that belongs to
her—we want to hear no blowing about South Carolina.”171 Simms couldn’t make the
case for South Carolina’s inclusion in American history, because American history had
been redefined in contrast to South Carolina. Shortly into his lecture tour, William
Gilmore Simms came to the realization that South Carolina’s inclusion in American
history was impossible, and he abandoned his errand into the North to return home; and
along with it, his national allegiance. Simms shed his earlier unionists sympathies and
170
171
As quoted by Oliphant, Odell, and Eaves, eds., The Letters of William Gilmore Simms, 3: 457n.
William Gilmore Simms to James Henry Hammond, Dec. 8, 1856, The Letters of William Gilmore Simms, 3:468.
71
became an avid supporter of secession. Nor was he alone. Simms’s abandonment of his
lecture tour was symbolic of South Carolina’s concurrent abandonment of American
identity.
Lorenzo Sabine’s critique of South Carolina’s Revolutionary history was
paramount at driving thousands of South Carolinians toward a new identity. When
Daniel Webster relayed a narrative of American history, he was careful to provide for the
conditional inclusion of most South Carolinians, and only specifically excluded a
minority of South Carolinians. Lorenzo Sabine, however, excluded the majority, and by
using history to do it, he precluded the conditional inclusion of most South Carolinians.
In fact, Sabine’s only exceptions were applicable to members of the State’s ancient
aristocracy. In doing so, Sabine helped to unite the majority of white South Carolinians
around a new identity.
On the final page of Lacy K. Ford’s Origins of Southern Radicalism, Ford
describes a scene that conveys the importance of history in antebellum South Carolina:
Two of South Carolina’s wealthiest men spent a warm fall evening on the
porch of a big plantation house currying the favor of a well-digger who
still had mud from his day’s work oozing from between his toes. Neither
Boykin, a planter of Federalist lineage, nor Chesnut, who would ultimately
serve the Confederacy on Jefferson Davis’s personal staff, provided the
controlling presence on the Boykin piazza. Instead, the man at the center
of attention, the man who seemed most satisfied and at ease with his
situation, was the common white, Squire McDonald….After all, the
Squire was “a free white man,” and if Chesnut and Boykin were members
of old and prominent South Carolina families, McDonald also had blood
ties to heroism and the proud Revolutionary heritage….The rich and
supposedly powerful were mesmerized by his presence and respectful of
his heritage.172
172
Lacy K. Ford, Jr., Origins of Southern Radicalism: The South Carolina Upcountry, 1800-1860 (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1988), 373.
72
This scene testifies to the influence of Revolutionary heritage in antebellum South
Carolina society. Squire McDonald possessed an unusual presence on that porch, and his
authority had nothing to do with his social class, his gender, his skin color, his
occupation, or whether or not he owned slaves. He derived his power through his ties to
the legacy of the American Revolution, a consideration that superseded all others in this
situation. When Sabine attacked the Revolutionary legacy of South Carolina, he wasn’t
just attacking elites like Boykin and Chesnut; he was attacking anyone with a tie to that
all-important legacy. Thus, he alienated South Carolinians from all walks of life, rich
and poor, planter and yeoman, male and female, upcountry and lowcountry, slaveholder
and non-slaveholder.
Denied inclusion in an emerging American identity, South Carolinians looked
within as they searched for answers to their identity crisis. “The parochial outlook,”
explained William R. Taylor, “which such men finally adopted was forced upon them by
their growing awareness of the singularity of their historical situation….”173 And the
sectionalized historical narrative they had constructed, in the hopes of solidifying their
place in the American historical experience, became the foundation of a South Carolina
identity that would allow them to secede with unwavering resolve.
South Carolinians eventually accepted the legacy of traitor, but they redefined what
that legacy meant. In 1850, Robert Barnwell Rhett exclaimed, “Let it be, that I am a
Traitor. The word has no terrors for me….I have been born of Traitors, but thank God,
they have been Traitors in the great cause of liberty, fighting against tyranny and
173
Taylor, 261.
73
oppression. Such treason will ever be mine whilst true to my lineage.” 174 At a banquet in
St. Helena Parish, a banner similarly read: “Oh that we were all such traitors.”175
Having created an historical narrative in which their ancestors were the highest
examples of heroism and liberty, they armed themselves with the confidence necessary to
inaugurate the secession movement. As William Porcher Miles implored his fellow
Carolinians to “cherish” their Revolutionary heritage, he declared “there we see no
timidity or time serving—no want of faith or manly self-confidence….There we see bold
wisdom and wise bravery—prudence warmed by valor, and courage tempered and
informed by reason.”176 Their ancestors had been a minority facing unfavorable odds;
and yet, they had emerged victorious. This was an historical lesson of inestimable worth,
as the outnumbered Carolinians attempted to break away from the union.
By the time South Carolina seceded from the Union, South Carolina’s historic
separation had permeated deep into the national psyche. South Carolinians were not a
rogue generation of Americans out to destroy the legacy of their fathers, but the inheritors
of a very un-American legacy, destined to follow in the footsteps of their forbears. When
Americans reacted to the secession of South Carolina, they alluded to the existence of a
distinctly South Carolinian historical experience, antithetic to their own. “The Toryism,”
wrote one Virginian, “of 1776 has never died out in South Carolina.”177 In a letter to
William Lowndes Yancey, Henry J. Raymond concurred, “a majority of her inhabitants
were Tories in the Revolution, and were opposed to independence. Their descendants
174
As quoted by Avery Craven, The Coming of the Civil War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957), 275.
William C. Davis, Rhett: The Turbulent Life and Times of a Fire-eater (Columbia, University of South Carolina
Press, 2001), 280.
176
As quoted by Franklin, 16.
177
“Personal Recollections of the War,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 33, No. 193 (June 1866), 2.
175
74
have inherited their political sentiments. South Carolina has never had a particle of
sympathy with the fundamental principles which lie at the basis of our Republican
institutions. From the very outset she has been at war with the dominant ideas of the
Confederacy.”178 West Virginia Governor F. H. Pierpoint found it “incomprehensible”
that “Virginia should have linked her fortune with South Carolina, whose history is
tainted with Toryism.”179
When John Palmer accused William G. Brownlow of treason to the South,
Brownlow delved into the past for his rebuttal:
Now, sir, what is your pedigree? You hail from a State which mustered
more Tories in the War of the Revolution than all the other States in the
Confederacy put together….it was the resort of Tories, and the home of
traitors, during that dark and trying period of our history….I have no
doubt there are Tories enough still in South Carolina, and the
descendants of Tories, to influence an attempt to go out of the Union in
the event of Lincoln’s election. And I think it a great misfortune that
the Constitution does not provide some means of letting the State out
peacable.180
Palmer and Brownlow condemned one another for the same crime, charges of treason.
The difference was they had two very different definitions of what treason was, because
they had two very different interpretations of American history. The Sabine-Simms
Controversy had armed both men with rivaling interpretations of the past, and in so
doing, they also armed them with separate identities. But Palmer and Brownlow were
hardly the only Americans impacted by this episode of the Ancient Rivalry, and the
conflict between them was neither the only one, nor the most intense, of its kind. When
178
Henry J. Raymond, “The Disunion Question: Third Letter from Mr. Raymond to Hon. W. L. Yancey,” New York
Times, Dec. 13, 1860, ProQuest Historical Newspapers, The New York Times (1851-2004).
179
F. H. Peirpoint, “To The People of Virginia”
180
Brownlow, 71.
75
Lorenzo Sabine published his interpretation of American history, he also armed Senator
Charles Sumner with the ammunition needed to engage in the increasingly virulent
politics of the nation’s capital.
76
CHAPTER THREE
THE CANING OF MR. SUMNER: THE BROOKS-SUMNER AFFAIR
“We entreat you to preserve the Union; but we warn you that
this is not to be done by assailing South Carolina.”
-the United States Telegraph181
“You have libeled my State and slandered a relative who is aged and absent and I am
come to punish you for it,” bellowed the Carolina firebrand as he raised his outstretched
arm above the seated senator from Massachusetts.182 And punish him he did. Preston
Smith Brooks rained down blow after blow upon a bewildered Charles Sumner, with a
palpitating furor only mitigated when the Gutta Percha cane clutched between his
whitening knuckles began to splinter and fragment. The stunned senators crowded
around the blood-drenched heap on the floor of the senate chamber; it was a scene
reminiscent of Caesar’s broken body on the floor of the Roman senate. Unlike Caesar,
Sumner lived on, ensuring that although his republic, like his body, might be easily
mangled, it was not so easily destroyed.
*****
Six months after the first shots of the American Civil War rang out over Charleston
harbor, George Francis Train, in a letter to the editor of the London American, wrote on
“How to Punish Traitors”:
When the secession balloon shortly collapses, the Federal forces should
make fast the event in history. Treason is about to die. Why, then, let the
traitor live? South Carolina has been, is now, and will continue to be, the
181
As quoted by David B. Sachsman, S. Kittrell Rushing, Debra Reddin Van Tuyll, eds., The Civil War and the Press
(New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2000), 32.
182
As quoted by Orville Vernon Burton, In My Father’s House Are Many Mansions: Family and Community in
Edgefield, South Carolina (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985), 94.
77
national assassin, unless summarily executed. Nullification followed
Toryism, Secession succeeded Nullification, and Death should be the
sequence of Secession. Bury then South Carolina in her damning villany,
and forgive the erring States she has led astray. How can this old pirate
craft be destroyed? We cannot scuttle her, nor can we burn her to the
water’s edge; but we can divide her, and give her rotten State Rights
timber to the adjoining States (that is, if they will accept them.) The
partition of Poland was a national crime, and the land is still dressed in the
deepest mourning; but the partition of South Carolina would be a national
retribution worthy of the great nation she sought to ruin. Blot her
abhorrent name out of the map of our fair Western World, and let us try
and forget that this hell-creating Province was ever one of the more or less
United States of America.
Enormous crime deserves enormous
punishment. South Carolina was born a traitor, has lived a traitor, and
should die the death of a traitor.183
As a bleak age of war dawned on the American horizon, Train’s recommendation was to
forgive the erring states except for South Carolina. While every Confederate state was
guilty of secession, slavery and open rebellion to the Federal Government, only South
Carolina warranted “retribution worthy of the great nation she sought to ruin,” and only
South Carolina should be forgotten as having been “one of the more or less United States
of America.”
Like so many Americans of his time, southerners as well as northerners, Train drew
a clear distinction between South Carolina and the rest of the South. At the root of this
disparity were elements far more profound than the inaugural secession. An entire
generation of Americans had come to view South Carolina not as a southern leader,
trailblazer, or exception, nor as a northern antagonist, adversary or antipode. “In the
same way that a whole generation of South Carolinians had grown up with disunion
thought,” explained Tennessee’s Andrew Johnson, “a whole generation of Americans had
183
George Francis Train, Union speeches delivered in England during the present American War (Philadelphia: T. B.
Peterson & Brothers, 1862), 46.
78
grown up with union in response to South Carolina antagonism.”184 In the minds of
many antebellum Americans, South Carolina embodied the American antithesis.
The process by which many Americans came to view South Carolina as the
American antithesis was a long and arduous one. Through the Hayne-Webster Debate,
Americans were familiarized with the idea that South Carolina did not share their
unconditional devotion to the Union, democracy, peace, and the legacy of their
forefathers. Through the Sabine-Simms Controversy, Americans were introduced to an
interpretation of American history in which South Carolina had been aligned against
them at the most critical moment of their past. Finally, through the Brooks-Sumner
Affair, Americans listened to the proclamation that South Carolina contributed nothing to
the rest of the nation; it was a shroud of darkness contrasted with the radiant light of
Kansas. This ongoing dichotomy engendered two distinct, well-formed identities by the
outbreak of the Civil War: an American identity predicated upon the exclusion of South
Carolina, and a South Carolina identity responding to the denial of inclusion.
*****
The defamation that had originally angered Preston Brooks was a continuation of the
statements made by Daniel Webster and Lorenzo Sabine. Delivering a speech entitled
“The Crime Against Kansas” on the Senate floor in May of 1856, Sumner took Sabine’s
history a step further. Here, the Republican Senator from Massachusetts proclaimed to
the country that the ripe young territory of Kansas was more American than one of the
184
As quoted by Jon L. Wakelyn, ed., Southern Pamphlets on Secession, November 1860-April 1861 (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 305-306.
79
thirteen original founding states; and unlike Sabine, who acknowledged some of South
Carolina’s historic attributes, Sumner recognized none:
And yet the Senator, to whom that "State" has in part committed the
guardianship of its good name, instead of moving, with backward treading
steps, to cover its nakedness, rushes forward in the very ecstasy of
madness, to expose it by provoking a comparison with Kansas. South
Carolina is old; Kansas is young. South Carolina counts by centuries;
where Kansas counts by years. But a beneficent example may be born in a
day; and I venture to say, that against the two centuries of the older
"State," may be already set the two years of trial, evolving corresponding
virtue, in the younger community. In the one, is the long wail of Slavery;
in the other, the hymns of Freedom. And if we glance at special
achievements, it will be difficult to find any thing in the history of South
Carolina which presents so much of heroic spirit in an heroic cause
appears in that repulse of the Missouri invaders by the beleaguered town
of Lawrence, where even the women gave their effective efforts to
Freedom. The matrons of Rome, who poured their jewels into the treasury
for the public defence; the wives of Prussia, who, with delicate fingers,
clothed their defenders against French invasion; the mothers of our own
Revolution, who sent forth their sons, covered with prayers and blessings,
to combat for human rights, did nothing of self-sacrifice truer than did
these women on this occasion.185
These comments, when placed within the context of those made by Webster and Sabine,
provide a fitting bookend to South Carolina’s graduated exclusion from American
identity and a unifying national narrative. It was an exclusion that had begun a
generation earlier, with the nullification crisis and the concept of a perpetual union. It
found historic credibility through Lorenzo Sabine’s history of the American Loyalists.
And it finally culminated with Sumner’s comparison of Kansas to South Carolina.
Sumner’s speech signaled the finality of South Carolina’s exclusion, and with it, the
emergence of a new identity, a South Carolina identity. It was this South Carolina
185
Appendix to the Congressional Globe, 34 Cong., 1 Sess., 543.
80
identity that allowed the people of South Carolina to play their peculiar role in the
coming war.
*****
When reviewing the Brooks-Sumner Affair, historians have tended to overlook
Sumner’s remarks regarding the history of South Carolina, choosing instead to emphasize
the importance of his remarks on slavery and Senator Butler. Although such remarks
were important, the comments pertaining to South Carolina’s history were just as
important, if not more important, in influencing Brooks’s reaction. When Brooks
approached Sumner, the first accusation he charged his adversary with was libeling South
Carolina.186 In a letter to his brother, written shortly after the incident, Brooks similarly
described his motives: “Sumner made a violent speech in which he insulted South
Carolina and Judge Butler grossly….I felt it my duty to relieve Butler and avenge the
insult to my State.”187 Six days later, he again professed: “I deem it proper to add that the
assault…was not because of his [Sumner’s] political principles, but because of the
insulting language used in reference to my State and absent relative.”188 Giving an
account of his actions before the Senate, Brooks explained:
Some time since a Senator from Massachusetts allowed himself, in an
elaborately prepared speech, to offer a gross insult to my State, and to a
venerable friend, who is my State representative, and who was absent at
the time. Not content with that, he published to the world, and circulated
extensively, this uncalled for libel on my State and my blood. Whatever
insults my State insults me. Her history and character have commanded
186
David Herbert Donald, Charles Sumner and the Coming of the Civil War (Naperville, Illinois: Sourcebooks, Inc.,
2009), 246, 363n.
187
Preston Brooks to J. H. Brooks, May 22, 1856, in Elmer D. Johnson and Kathleen Lewis Sloan, eds., South
Carolina: A Documentary Profile of the Palmetto State (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1971), 308.
188
as quoted by Burton, 94.
81
my pious veneration; and in her defense I hope I shall always be prepared,
humbly and modestly, to perform the duty of a son.189
Brooks maintained this same tone and sentiment when he addressed his constituency:
…I silently vowed that, though nature should deny me the privilege of
adding even an humble intellectual flower to the chaplet of South
Carolina, I would be a sentinel to her honor and guard the glories, with
which better and abler men had graced her brow. On the 19th and 20th of
May last past, a Senator from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts
falsified her history and defamed her character. I remembered my resolve,
and performed my vow.190
According to Brooks’s various testimonies, his motives were always attached to
Sumner’s criticism of South Carolina’s history.
When Senator A. P. Butler returned to the Senate, he justified Brooks’s
unprecedented display of violence by focusing on the unprecedented nature of Sumner’s
speech:
I shall ask the gentleman another question: whether the Senator from
Massachusetts is not the first, the very first, and the only one, as far as I
know, who has used his privilege, or his position here…to assail the
revolutionary history of any State in the Union? Is there another instance
in which one member of the Senate of the United States has gone out of
his way to assail the revolutionary history of one of the “Old Thirteen?”
He is the first who has put his profane hand upon that sacred volume….By
what tenure does he hold his place here as a judge to pronounce judgment
on the history of South Carolina?191
Like Brooks, Bulter believed Sumner’s criticism of South Carolina’s history was central
to this incident.
189
Appendix to the Congressional Globe, 34 Cong., 1 Sess., 831.
South Carolinian, 18 July 1856.
191
Appendix to the Congressional Globe, 34 Cong., 1 Sess., 664.
190
82
Brooks’s explanation for, and Butler’s justification of, his action reveals an acute
sensitivity to the honor of South Carolina and its past. Nor were they alone in this regard.
In a letter published by the Edgefield Advertiser, R. C. Griffin confided:
My proudest recollections of Washington will be associated with my
humble, yet zealous defense of my State against aspersions against her
honor and patriotism. You should have known, my dear colonel, that here
it is very popular, and very fashionable to abuse South Carolina. It has
been my pride and pleasure, on every occasion, when I have heard a word
of reproach against her, to raise my voice in her defense.192
Griffin made an important observation when he pointed out how it was both “popular”
and “fashionable” to criticize South Carolina in the nation’s capital. The remarks of
Sumner, as well as similar comments made by Anson Burlingame and other northern
politicians, furnish the evidence to support this claim. This was the atmosphere in which
South Carolina’s politicians were expected to govern, exercise diplomacy, and represent
the interests of their constituency. Just as Hayne and Simms had been quick to defend
South Carolina’s historic record in the 1830s and 40s, South Carolina’s representatives in
the 1850s were equally active in responding to criticism. Following the caning of
Sumner, South Carolina Senators Butler and Evans, and Representative Keitt, all
delivered orations defending the history of South Carolina.193
More importantly, the people of South Carolina revealed their sensitivity to the
history and honor of their state through their reaction to the Brooks-Sumner Affair. One
South Carolinian threatened Sumner with a “worse thrashing” if he ever “insult our little
192
193
Edgefield Advertiser, 24 Dec. 1860.
Appendix to the Congressional Globe, 34 Cong., 1 Sess., 625-630; ibid, 702-709; ibid, 833-838.
83
state” again.194 Like Brooks, the Charleston Mercury found Sumner detestable not
because of any political reason, but “because he has dared, in contravention of all
propriety, and with studied contempt of all decorum, to introduce our State in his debate,
in terms so gross and insulting that no son of hers could have remained unmoved.”195
After Brooks resigned his seat in the House of Representatives, the Mercury correctly
predicted he would return home to “be received by his constituency with open arms, and
sent in triumph back, to confront, and, if need be, we trust, to punish, the enemies and
calumniators of his State.”196 Revealing a preoccupation with the past, the Mercury then
went on to praise the event for contributing “to a more complete vindication of the
Revolutionary fame and history of South Carolina, than was ever before made in
Congress.”197 Again, the Revolutionary heritage of South Carolina became a point of
contention, just as it had been during the Hayne-Webster Debate and the Sabine-Simms
Controversy. Finally, the Mercury leveled its own punishment of Sumner, declaring
“wherever manhood is prized and truth admired, the name of CHARLES SUMNER will
descend upon the lips of men, from father to son, as the perfect synonyme of cowardice
and baseness. May such be the end of every calumniator of South Carolina!”198 Through
these editorials, the Mercury indicated its belief that the chief issue of the Brooks-Sumner
Affair revolved around Sumner’s critique of South Carolina and its history.
194
As quoted by Frederick J. Blue, Charles Sumner and the Conscience of the North (Arlington Heights, IL: Harlan
Davidson, Inc., 1994), 95.
195
The Charleston Mercury, May 28, 1856.
196
The Charleston Mercury, as quoted by the New York Times, July 29, 1856.
197
Ibid.
198
Ibid.
84
The Yorkville Enquirer offered a similar assessment of the affair to its readers. “A
very large portion of the speech, however, was taken up in vilifying and heaping the most
insulting abuse upon our State and her venerable Senator,” a Washington observer
conveyed to the editors of the Enquirer. “South Carolina may well feel proud of her son.
Not only has he bravely sustained her honor upon the battle-field, and added additional
lustre {sic} to her name in the council hall of the nation, but he has shown his willingness
to avenge her insulted honor, no matter where the insult is offered or by whom. In
Sumner he has met and justly chastised our calumniators, and in the only manner, too,
which is now left to us.”199
Newspapers and assemblies across the state echoed the opinions of the Mercury and
Enquirer. At a meeting in Columbia, a committee of citizens met with Brooks, “for the
purpose of receiving some testimonials of their appreciation of your gallant conduct in
defending the honor of our State.”200 They commended Brooks for “inflicting upon
Senator Sumner the punishment he so richly earned by his libelous attack upon the State
of Carolina and its faithful Senator.”201 The public meeting in York District unanimously
adopted the following resolution:
Resolved, That in the opinions of this meeting, the severe castigation
inflicted upon Charles Sumner, of Massachusetts, by Col. Preston S.
Brooks, of this State, was a richly-deserved chastisement for an
unprovoked and insulting imputation upon the honor and reputation of our
State, and of one of her beloved and venerable Senators.202
199
the Yorkville Enquirer, 29 May 1856.
the Carolina Times, 30 Aug. 1856, as quoted by the New York Times, 4 Sept. 1856.
201
As quoted by the New York Times, 10 June 1856.
202
Yorkville Enquirer, 5 June 1856.
200
85
The Carolina Spartan complained of Sumner’s “libels upon Judge Butler and South
Carolina of the most mendacious character,” and the Edgefield Advertiser proclaimed:
“Well, we have borne insult long enough, and now let the conflict come if it must.”203 At
the first meeting in South Carolina held to praise and approve the actions of Brooks, the
citizens of Newberry explained their appreciation:
Our Senators and Representatives in Congress have for a series of years
patiently submitted to these tirades of calumny and vituperation, and they
have in vain attempted to meet insults by argument and reason. We were
not surprised, therefore, that the spirit of resentment should break forth
into acts of violence. Ordinarily we might not be ready to justify such
measures of redress, but the aggravated insults given by the Senator from
Massachusetts on the occasion referred to, in keeping with his uniform
conduct, furnish an ample justification of our Representative.204
According to these South Carolinians, Brooks’s behavior was excusable because South
Carolinians had been the recipients of criticism and condemnation for years, with
previous attempts to mitigate the insults proving unsuccessful. Three years later, the
Laurensville Herald advocated the uniform adoption of “the precedent of Mr. Brooks,”
before issuing its verdict on the union: “we say, while we are in the Union, let us demand
that courtesy and justice to our Representatives and State which is awarded to our sister
States of the Confederacy.”205
By the time Sumner attacked the Palmetto State, South Carolinians had developed an
accentuated sensitivity to the honor and reputation of their state precisely because it
occupied a precarious position in American national identity. Having been largely
excluded from Massachusetts’s construction of American identity, South Carolinians
203
Carolina Spartan, 29 May 1856; Edgefield Advertiser, 28 May 1856.
As quoted by Harold S. Schultz, Nationalism and Sectionalism in South Carolina, 1852-1860: A Study of the
Movement for Southern Independence (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1950), 119.
205
Laurensville Herald, 6 June 1859.
204
86
cherished their state identity because it had replaced a national identity they were being
barred from. Clearly, the patriotism of South Carolinians was being tempered by a
devotion to, and awareness of, the besieged honor of their State.
*****
To understand how and why a unique South Carolina psychology and identity
emerged as a result of their exclusion from American identity, we must understand that
there was, indeed, a discernable exclusion. Once upon a time, South Carolina had been
included in the American narrative and portrayed in a positive light. The testimonies of
the founding fathers reveal direct contradictions to the assertions later made by Charles
Sumner and others. The claim that South Carolina’s contributions to the American
Revolution were counterproductive is undermined by John Adams’s praise:
I feel a strong affection for South Carolina for several reasons. 1. I think
them as stanch patriots as any in America. 2. I think them as brave. 3.
They are the only people in America who have maintained a post and
defended a fort. 4. They have sent us a new delegate whom I greatly
admire, Mr. Laurens, their Lieutenant-governor, a gentleman of great
fortunes, great abilities, modesty and integrity, and great experience too.
If all the States would send us such men, it would be a pleasure to be
here.206
Similarly, the assumption that South Carolina was a bulwark against civilization and
humanity, driven by selfish and savage motives, were a blaring contrast to the accolades
of John Jay. “Although much severity was naturally expected and would have been
excusable in South Carolina considering the manner in which she has been treated,”
wrote Jay, “yet great regard to justice and an uncommon degree of benevolence,
206
John Adams to Abigail Adams, 19 Aug. 1777, in Frank Shuffelton, ed., The Letters of John and Abigail Adams
(New York: Penguin Group, 2004), 295.
87
humanity, and mercy have marked her conduct toward her offending citizens.”207 Thus,
when Charles Sumner and other antebellum Americans indicated that South Carolina
contributed little, if anything, to America and Civilization, they were taking a position
that would’ve been found untenable at an earlier period in America’s history. And even if
the opinions of Adams and Jay were inaccurate, they represent a perception of South
Carolina that facilitated the State’s inclusion in America.
The graduated process from inclusion to exclusion went hand in hand with the
deteriorating popularity of unionism in antebellum South Carolina. When Daniel
Webster replied to Hayne in 1830, he only excluded a small minority of South
Carolinians. As such, there existed a small, but viable, unionist party in South Carolina
throughout the nullification crisis.
Shortly after the Sabine-Simms Controversy, the vast
majority of South Carolinians fell into two groups of disunionists: cooperative or separate
state secessionists. And following Sumner’s vicious critique of South Carolina history,
the presence of unionism in South Carolina had, with the exception of a handful of
noteworthy leaders, eroded away completely. Interestingly enough, Hayne, Simms, and
Brooks had all fostered strong nationalist, or unionist, sympathies earlier on in their
careers. Their personal transformations are a testament to the broader transformation in
sentiment occurring throughout South Carolina. Unionist sympathies died away after
coming into direct confrontation with the role South Carolina played in the Union, as it
was perceived by other Americans. For the rest of the nation, the United States of
America was a country in which South Carolina’s place was becoming more and more
207
As quoted by C. Gregg Singer, South Carolina in the Confederation (Philadelphia: Privately Printed, 1941), 121.
88
tenuous.
Whereas Webster and Sabine had provided specific limitations and parameters for
their exclusion of South Carolina from the rest of the nation, Sumner introduced a broad,
all-encompassing exclusion of South Carolina, not only from the Union, but from the rest
of humanity, civilization, and light. His speech barred every South Carolinian from
inclusion in a grand American narrative. Old, young, rich, poor, male, female, white and
black were all excluded from his conception of worth:
Were the whole history of South Carolina blotted out of existence, from its
very beginning down to the day of the last election of the Senator to his
present seat on this floor, civilization might lose -- I do not say how little;
but surely less than it has already gained by the example of Kansas, in its
valiant struggle against oppression, and in the development of a new
science of emigration. Already, in Lawrence alone, there are newspapers
and schools, including a High School, and throughout this infant Territory
there is more mature scholarship far, in proportion to its inhabitants, than
in all South Carolina. Ah, sir, I tell the Senator that Kansas, welcomed as a
free State, will be a "ministering angel" to the Republic, when South
Carolina, in the cloak of darkness which she hugs, "lies howling."208
Sumner did not merely bar South Carolinians from an American narrative of worth, but
from civilization in general. This claim resonated throughout the North. Frederick Law
Olmstead corroborated Sumner’s claim, referring to South Carolinians:
Yet scarce anything has been accomplished by them for the
advancement of learning and science, and there have been fewer
valuable inventions and discoveries, or designs in art, or literary
compositions of a high rank, or anything else, contrived or executed for
the good of the whole community, or the world at large (cotton and rice
growing excepted), in South Carolina, than in any community of equal
numbers and wealth, probably in the world.209
208
Appendix to the Congressional Globe, 34 Cong., 1 Sess., 543.
Frederick Law Olmsted, A Journey in the Seaboard Slave States, In the Years 1853-1854, With Remarks on Their
Economy (New York: The Knickerbocker Press, 1904), 2:138.
209
89
And George Templeton Strong described South Carolina as a “preposterous little
state…utterly below the city of New York or Boston or Philadelphia in resources,
civilization, importance, and anything else.”210 If, as Webster and the American Whigs
had earlier suggested, America was the pinnacle of civilization, then the declarations of
Sumner, Olmstead and Strong were indicative of South Carolina’s separation from
America.
Sumner’s “cloak of darkness” remark provided a fitting conclusion to a portrayal
commenced by Daniel Webster, who, as he initiated the process leading to South
Carolina’s eventual exclusion, forewarned of the day “when our associated and fraternal
stripes shall be severed asunder, and when that happy constellation under which we have
risen to so much renown, shall be broken up, and seen sinking, star after star, into
obscurity and night!”211 By 1856, in the eyes of Sumner and the nation, that was
precisely what South Carolina had done. Its star had fallen into obscurity and night.
*****
The ancient rivalry between Massachusetts and South Carolina became analogous to
a rivalry between America and “anti-America.” Massachusetts was a member of the
Union with the power to remain identified with the rest of the nation. People from
Massachusetts, such as Webster, Sabine, Sumner, Emerson, and others, wielded a greater
amount of influence, than their South Carolina contemporaries, in their ability to define
America on their own terms. South Carolina’s rivalry with Massachusetts determined
that the former would be set outside the parameters of American identity, as it was
210
211
As quoted by Susan-Mary Grant, North over South, 68.
Register of Debates in Congress, 21 Cong., 1 Sess., 38.
90
defined by Massachusetts. And Massachusetts’s definition of American identity, at least
within the context of defining an American identity without South Carolina, increasingly
became the standard for the rest of the nation.
In journals, letters, speeches & newspapers, Americans revealed that the perception
of South Carolina as un-American was widely accepted throughout the country by the
time of the Civil War. Two days after the state’s secession, the New York Courier and
Enquirer declared the people of South Carolina were “no longer our brethren, but a band
of Rebels and Traitors.”212 Another described the unity of sentiment regarding South
Carolina: “there is now but one party—one ernest and angry sentiment, ready to break
forth at any moment and wipe out the traitors.”213 Other, more offensive remarks
testified to the efficacy of Sumner’s critique of South Carolina. “The white people of
South Carolina,” observed Union Major George W. Nichols as he traveled through the
state, “are among the most degraded specimens of humanity I ever saw—lazy, shiftless;
only energy to whine. The higher classes in South Carolina represent the scum, the
lower, the dregs of civilization. They are not Americans; they are merely South
Carolinians.”214
Northern attitudes towards South Carolina, contrasted with those regarding the South
in general, provide perhaps the best evidence of South Carolina as the American
antithesis. Just as Train had called to forgive the other southern states while forgetting
South Carolina’s existence, numerous northern sentiments indicated that Confederates
212
as quoted by Kenneth M. Stampp, And the War Came: The North and the Secession Crisis, 1860-1861 (Baton
Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1970), 68-69.
213
As quoted by Stampp, And the War Came, 74.
214
As quoted by James C. Hemphill, “The South and the Negro Vote,” in George Harvey, ed., The North American
Review, vol. 202, no. 1 (July 1915), 215.
91
were considered their former and fellow countrymen, with the sole exception of South
Carolina. Among the most telling accounts were those calling for the nation to allow
South Carolina’s withdrawal. In a letter to the editor of the New York Times, one man
describes a meeting of gentlemen, attended by Democrats and former Whigs, where “it
was unanimously agreed that it would be much better for this country to let South
Carolina go peaceably out of this Union, with, however, the distinct understanding that
she forever stays out, and never makes an application to be readmitted;…We say, in the
name of common sense, let her go on her own terms—but never let her come back.”215
“If [South Carolina] will, let her go,” wrote the Chicago Tribune, “and like a limb lopped
from a healthy trunk, wilt and rot where she falls.”216 Similarly, “if South Carolina could
be dealt with singly in this matter,” Henry L. Raymond believed, “she would go out of
the Union with the unanimous consent of the other States.”217
Some suggested the government “buy up South Carolina, clear the people all out &
stock it anew with good honest men willing & able to work with their own hands.”218
And others were even so bold as to advocate complete eradication: “I hope we may be
able to exterminate the whole breed of South Carolina, she is too overbearing and should
be wiped out from the earth.”219 “If we,” advised Charles L. Redmond, “recommend to
the slaves of South Carolina to rise in rebellion, it would work greater things than we
215
Anonymous, “Why not let South Carolina Secede?,” New York Times, 13 Nov. 1860, ProQuest Historical
Newspapers, The New York Times (1851-2004).
216
as quoted by Stampp, 22.
217
Henry J. Raymond, “The Disunion Question: Third Letter from Mr. Raymond to Hon. W. L. Yancey,” New York
Times, Dec. 13, 1860, ProQuest Historical Newspapers, The New York Times (1851-2004).
218
As quoted by Stampp, 258.
219
As quoted by Charles Royster, The Destructive War: William Tecumseh Sherman, Stonewall Jackson, and the
Americans (New York: Vintage Books, 1991), 5.
92
imagine.”220 In a war fought to preserve the American union, these quotes reveal that
many Americans did not consider South Carolina a part of that union. Regardless of
whether their prescription was separation, deportation, or extermination, they all
conveyed the conviction that South Carolinians and Americans did not constitute a
singular identity.
Reflecting these attitudes, the war on the Confederacy often resembled a war against
two distinct enemies: former Americans and South Carolinians. By no means did the
Union adopt a uniform policy for the entire Confederacy. As General Sherman’s army
approached South Carolina, soldiers forewarned of the disparity in treatment the
Carolinians would receive: “we have laid a heavy hand on Georgia, but that is light
compared to what South Carolina will catch.”221 Another told a Georgia woman: “You
think the people of Georgia are faring badly, and they are, but God pity the people of
South Carolina when this army gets there, for we have orders to lay everything in ashes—
not to leave a green thing in the State for man or beast….Here our soldiers were held in
check…and when we get to South Carolina they will be turned loose to follow their own
inclinations.”222 From Savannah, Orlando Poe wrote his wife: “We are on her borders,
ready to carry fire & sword into every part of that state.”223
Sherman himself wrote Major General Henry Slocum to remind him of the transition
which should follow after crossing the Savannah: “Don’t forget that when you have
220
as quoted by Stanley Harrold, The Abolitionists and the South, 1831-1861 (Lexington: The University Press of
Kentucky, 1995), 61.
221
As quoted by Walter Brian Cisco, Wade Hampton: Confederate Warrior, Conservative Statesman (Washington,
D.C.: Brassey’s, Inc., 2004), 151.
222
As quoted by Bradley Tyler Johnson, ed., A Memoir of the Life and Public Service of Joseph E. Johnston
(Baltimore: R. H. Woodward & Company, 1891), 142.
223
As quoted by Cisco, 151.
93
crossed the Savannah River you will be in South Carolina. You need not be so careful
there about private property as we have been. The more of it you destroy the better it will
be….Now is the time to punish [the people of South Carolina.]”224 “Boys, this is old
South Carolina,” an Ohioan reminded his compeers, “lets give her h-ll.”225 Another
soldier wrote home: “Shermans policy for South Carolina is understood to be destruction
as we go.”226 “It was universally understood,” another claimed, “that the little finger of
the army in South Carolina was to be thicker than its loins in Georgia.”227 And just as
these soldiers had forewarned, destruction began immediately after the army entered the
state.
General Sherman wrote that the real march of his army did not begin until February
1st, the day his troops crossed into South Carolina.228 This was the day the armies of the
North began their march against the people of South Carolina, against the people whose
memory had been erased from the pages of American history by Sabine and Sumner.
This was the day they marched against a people whose only legacy was that of treason to
the Republic. To Sherman and countless others, this legacy was the root of the war, and
the preeminent purpose of their march through the South was to eradicate it. This was
the march that would both validate and avenge Charles Sumner. The march through
224
Ibid, 151.
As quoted by Mark Grimsley, The Hard Hand of War: Union Military Policy Toward Southern Civilians, 18611865 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 201.
226
As quoted by Royster, 344.
227
Charles D. Kerr, “Address by Colonel Charles D. Kerr,” Glimpses of the Nation’s Struggle: A Series of Papers Read
Before the Minnesota Commandery of the Military Order of the Loyal Legion of the United States (St. Paul, MN: St.
Paul Book and Stationary Company, 1887), 219.
228
William Tecumseh Sherman, “Sherman’s Campaigns: Operations in the Carolinas-His Official Report,” New York
Times, 25 April 1865.
225
94
Georgia had been about reclaiming a portion of America in rebellion; the march through
South Carolina was about destroying anti-America.
Reaffirming this sentiment, one historian writes, “from the moment the Federals
crossed the Savannah River, however, incidents of pillaging and arson accelerated
dramatically.”229 “There was a recklessness by the soldiery in South Carolina,” another
described, “that they never exhibited before and a sort of general ‘don’t care’ on the part
of the officers.”230 William Hazen confirmed these declarations, giving his firsthand
account of the destruction:
We were not out of sight of Port Royal Ferry when the black columns of
smoke began to ascend. Within half a mile of Pocotaligo we halted near a
large farm-house while the head of the column was skirmishing. As we
waited here, I was requested by a staff-officer to send and burn the house.
I did give the order, but quickly withdrew it, and sent my men away. This
did not save the house, which was soon in flames. Here began a carnival
of destruction that ended with the burning of Columbia….There was
scarcely a building far or near on the line of that march that was not
burned. Often I have seen this work going on in the presence of the
highest officers, with no word of disapproval.231
A reporter traveling with Sherman’s army similarly recorded the differences which
occurred on opposite sides of the Savannah: “As for wholesale burnings, pillage,
devastation, committed in South Carolina, magnify all I have said of Georgia some fifty
fold, and then throw in an occasional murder, ‘just to make an old, hard-fisted cuss come
to his senses,’ and you have a pretty good idea of the whole thing.”232
229
Grimsley, 200.
As quoted by Stephen V. Ash, When the Yankees Came: Conflict and Chaos in the Occupied South, 1861-1865
(Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 56.
231
William Babcock Hazen, A Narrative of Military Service (Boston: Ticknor and Company, 1885), 337.
232
As quoted by Sarah E. Gardner, Blood and Irony: Southern White Women’s Narratives of the Civil War, 1861-1937
(Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 203.
230
95
The stark contrast witnessed during the army’s transition from Georgia into South
Carolina was again seen, in reversed form, as it crossed from South Carolina into North
Carolina. On March 7th, Sherman wrote to Kilpatrick, “Deal as moderately and fairly by
the North Carolinians as possible and fan the flame of discord already subsisting between
them and their proud cousins of South Carolina.”233 As the Army of the Tennessee
marched through the South on behalf of the Union, Sherman’s advice to Kilpatrick is
noteworthy. If northerners were fighting for the preservation of their fathers’ Union, why
did Sherman want to “fan the flames of discord” between North and South Carolina? It is
probable that Sherman’s words indicate a military strategy designed to divide and
conquer the states of the Confederacy, but such an explanation cannot account for why
Sherman didn’t adopt that strategy as his army crossed the borders between other
Confederate States. If Sherman’s words are placed within the context of differential
treatment applied to South Carolinians and other Confederate States, they reflect South
Carolina’s exclusion from American identity. Sherman cared very much about the
preservation of the Union, but in his eyes, and in the eyes of many Americans, South
Carolinians were not a part of that Union, at least not in the same sense that North
Carolinians and Georgians were. In a war fought between brothers, South Carolinians
were merely “proud cousins.”
Just as soldiers had been notified as they crossed into South Carolina,
announcements were issued when they left it. Joseph T. Glatthaar writes, “Once the
army crossed over into North Carolina, officers issued orders to remind the soldiers that
233
As quoted by John G. Barrett, Sherman’s March Through the Carolinas (Chapel Hill: The University of North
Carolina Press, 1956), 120.
96
North Carolina had been the last state to secede and had a strong Unionist minority.
They urged troops to distinguish between the people of the Tarheel State and South
Carolina.”234 It was easy for American troops to make this distinction, and “from the
moment of entering North Carolina the whole demeanor of the army changed, and the
men yielded with alacrity to the customary restraints of discipline.”235 For these soldiers,
North Carolinians and Georgians were just Americans that had been “led astray.” South
Carolinians, on the other hand, were national enemies.
After learning that his newborn nephew would be named after him, an Indiana
soldier revealed, in a letter to his sister, the degree to which he believed South
Carolinians were his nation’s enemy:
I fear you cannot get him into the service soon enough to help us in this
war, but there may be other wars hereafter. Be sure you teach him to
despise South Carolinians and there is no danger of his ever fighting on
the wrong side.236
A new American had entered the world, and the best parental advice this Hoosier could
provide was “teach him to despise South Carolinians.” He did not feel it necessary that
his nephew be taught to despise slavery, nor secession, nor states-rights, nor aristocracy,
nor anti-democratic government, nor southern separatism, nor rebellion, nor treason, but
South Carolinians, the perceivable enemy of all future wars. South Carolina had become,
in the mind of this American, the emblematic antithesis of everything American.
234
Joseph T. Glatthaar, The American Civil War: The War in the West, 1863-1865 (Great Britain: Osprey Publishing,
2001), 62.
235
S. M. Bowman and R. B. Irwin, Sherman and his Campaigns: a Military Biography (New York: Charles B.
Richardson, 1865), 353.
236
as quoted by Barrett, 39.
97
Nor were the distinctions and animosities exhibited toward South Carolina limited to
north of the Mason-Dixon. Southerners were often equally virulent when they spoke
about South Carolinians. Sally Campbell Preston McDowell, daughter of Virginia
Governor James McDowell and ex-wife of Maryland Governor Francis Thomas,
responded to the caning of Charles Sumner:
I admit Sumner was insulting; but that was no excuse for the dastardly
conduct of the other. However, I am prejudiced. I despise South
Carolina,…In fact, it wd be well if all S. Carolina would have a whipping.
She is so troublesome and supercilious; so full of airs and swell and
bombast; so exacting and so lazy; so presuming and so good-for-nothing;
she seems to me like a petted, spoiled, selfish, irritable silly woman—the
very most despicable thing I know; unconnected with absolute vice.237
Sue Morgan Dawson wrote to a friend, complaining of South Carolinians, who “alone
believe in the fiction of their law, justice or decency…they are an unprincipled, mongrel,
ungrateful race, playing at ‘honor’ and ‘chivalry.’”238 Others described South Carolina as
“a nuisance,” “a pestiferous grumbler,” and a state apt to act in a “frenzy [which]
surpasses in folly and wickedness, anything which fancy in her wildest mood has yet
been able to conceive.”239 The Vicksburg Whig declared: “Our heart sickens at the
rashness of a misguided and demagogue-ridden commonwealth.”240
Over a month before South Carolina’s secession, the Wilmington Daily Herald
proclaimed: “There are no two adjoining states in the Union whose people have so little
237
Sally McDowell to John Miller, May 31, 1856 , in Thomas E. Buckley, ed., “If You Love that Lady Don’t Marry
Her”: The Courtship Letters of Sally McDowell and John Miller, 1854-1856 (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri
Press, 2000), 596.
238
As quoted by Bertram Wyatt-Brown, The Shaping of Southern Culture: Honor, Grace, and War, 1760s-1890s
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 279.
239
As quoted by David M. Potter, The Impending Crisis, 1848-1861 (New York: Harper & Row, 1976), 506.
240
As quoted by Donald E. Reynolds, Editors Make War: Southern Newspapers in the Secession Crisis (Carbondale,
IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2006), 149.
98
community of feeling as North and South Carolina.”241 The Herald was ardently
opposed to secession and highly critical of South Carolina, advising its readers not to be
“dragged into revolution and anarchy, and all to please South Carolina, who, by her
insufferable arrogance, and conceited importance, has been a source of annoyance and
disquietude to the whole country, North and South, for the last thirty years.”242 The
Savannah Republican echoed these sentiments: “Georgia will not become an appendage
of this political comet [South Carolina]—which is ever ready to dash into the midst of
our glorious constellation of stars and destroy the harmony of their orbits.”243 The
figurative imagery employed by the Republican exudes the language of exclusion. As a
comet, South Carolina was a threat to, not a part of, the glorious constellation of
American stars.
Many southerners agreed with Northern prescriptions for dealing with South
Carolina. “We say, let them go,” announced the Charlestown Virginia Free Press. “The
Union will be rid of some pestiferous grumblers, who, like Lucifer, would have become
tired of the golden streets and adornments of Heaven itself.”244 South Carolina, declared
the Virginia Free Press, no more belonged in the Union than Satan belonged in Heaven.
“We look to that unfortunate little State,” declared a Tennessee newspaper, “and exclaim
with MacBeth, ‘Out d—d spot.’”245 “You may leave this vessel [the Union], you may go
out in the rickety boats of your little state and hoist your miserable cabbage-leaf of a
241
As quoted by Potter, The Impending Crisis, 507n.
Charles Edward Cauthen, South Carolina Goes to War, 1860-1865 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press,
1950, 2005), 30.
243
as quoted by John Barnwell, Love of Order: South Carolina’s First Secession Crisis (Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 1982), 79.
244
as quoted by Reynolds, Editors Make War, 149.
245
Ibid, 149.
242
99
Palmetto flag; but depend upon it, men and brethren,” forewarned the Knoxville Whig,
“you will be dashed to pieces on the rocks.”246
Mary Chesnut described Confederate Virginians as “proud of their heroic dead and
living soldiers—but are prepared to say with truth that [they] always preferred to remain
in the Union and ready to assure the first comers of Yankees that they have always hated
South Carolina seceders and nullifiers as much as the Yankees do.”247 “Travelling
through the State,” John Townsend Trowbridge similarly noted, “I found a majority of
the people professing to have been at heart Union men all the while. They could never
forgive South Carolina for the evil course in which she had led them; and it was very
common to her the wish expressed, ‘that South Carolina and Massachusetts were kicked
out into the Atlantic together.’”248
South Carolinians were keenly aware of the stigmas and perceptions attached to their
state as they interacted with other southerners. William Henry Trescot wrote home,
telling of “how they laughed at little South Carolina” in Washington.249 Oscar Lieber,
traveling through Alabama in July of 1851, reported to his mother that South Carolina
had “not many admirers here. The other day a blacksmith accosted me: ‘Capt. I say,
now you’se from Sou Calina is you? Well maybe you can tell me vot she’s a kicking up
such a dust about. Seems to me as long as I can remember, an I aint young nether, she’s
246
As quoted by Potter, The Impending Crisis, 507n.
Mary Boykin Miller Chesnut, Ben Ames Williams, ed., A Diary From Dixie (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company,
1976), 494.
248
John Townsend Trowbridge, The South: A Tour of its Battlefields and Ruined Cities, A Journey through the
Desolated States, and Talks with the People, 1867 (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2006), 234.
249
As quoted by William W. Freehling, The Road to Disunion, Volume II: Secessionists Triumphant, 1854-1861 (New
York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 372.
247
100
been a kicking up about some ***damn thing or other.”250 Daniel Wallace of Union
District was upset to discover a great deal of “prejudice against South Carolina,” in
Mississippi, “on account of the Doctrines of 1832,” and James Hamilton, Jr. reported that
“Georgia came to dislike us…more than the people of Massachusetts.”251 Likewise,
James Henry Hammond congratulated William Gilmore Simms “on having won laurels
in Georgia, where every thing Carolinian is received with such bitter prejudice.”252 The
northern and southern criticisms of South Carolina, coupled with the awareness of South
Carolinians, helped destroy the bonds uniting South Carolina to the union.
Amid the turmoil of the Nullification Crisis, the United States Telegraph urged
moderation, forewarning, “we entreat you to preserve the Union; but we warn you that
this is not to be done by assailing South Carolina.”253 Richard E. Merrill of New
Hampshire had a similar understanding of attacks on South Carolina and the security of
the union. In a letter to John C. Calhoun, Merrill wrote:
These treasonable, fanatical, political jugglers, create considerable
prejudice against the South…and the despicable faction led on by John P.
Hale [Senator-elect from N.H.] take particular pains to abuse South
Carolina in an especial manner. The course of your Legislature in regard
to the N. Hampshire Resolutions was the most proper rebuke that could be
administered. I have the pleasure of living in a town whose inhabitants are
of a different character from the above. We honour the home of the
Sumpter’s, Marions, Pin[c]kneys & Hayne’s. “The union—it must be
preserved,” is our motto.254
250
As quoted by Barnwell, Love of Order, 175.
Ibid, 85, 47.
252
James Henry Hammond to William Gilmore Simms, 17 Nov. 1847, in Mary Simms Oliphant, Alfred Taylor Odell,
and T.C. Duncan Eaves, eds., The Letters of William Gilmore (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1954),
2:371n.
253
As quoted by Sachsman, 32.
254
Richard E. Merrill to John C. Calhoun, 4 Jan. 1847, in Clyde N. Wilson, ed., The Papers of John C. Calhoun
(Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1998), 24:53.
251
101
Unfortunately, Webster, Sabine, Sumner and other Americans failed to heed this advice,
and for three decades their continual verbal assaults slowly eroded South Carolina’s
ability to be committed to a union in which it was constantly disparaged.
The slow process by which South Carolinians were excluded had destroyed the
sentimental attachments to the union present in every other Confederate state. By 1860,
the vast number of South Carolinians had shed any emotional attachments to the Union.
Addressing an upcountry audience, William King Easley asked, “What has this union
with the Yankees been to us that we should love it above all things else?”255 David G.
Harris was even more adamant in his assessment: “As [South Carolina] has declared her
independence, I had rather see her blotted out of existence, than to apply for admittance
in the union again. Let her stay out if she perishes for it. Let her die rather than so
humble herself.”256 T. H. Spann echoed this sentiment: “We have been grossly cheated
by the North and I would rather that every soul of us would be exterminated than we
should be allied to her again.”257 These feelings had been slowly brewing in the hearts of
many South Carolinians. A decade earlier, John Pendleton Kennedy wrote in his journal,
"The present generation of South Carolinians are educated in the most settled hatred of
the United States.”258
Reporter Sidney Andrews later observed: “In South Carolina there is very little
pretense of love for the Union, but everywhere a passionate devotion to the State, and the
255
William King Easley, c. 1860, South Caroliniana Library archives.
David G. Harris, Piedmont Farmer: The Journals of David Golightly Harris, 1855-1870, ed. Philip N. Racine
(Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1990), 172.
257
As quoted by William C. Davis, Look Away!: A History of the Confederate States of America (New York: The Free
Press, 2003), 31.
258
John Pendleton Kennedy, Journal, vol. 7, 1 Aug. 1851, as quoted by Michael O’Brien, ed., An Evening When Alone:
Four Journals of Single Women in the South, 1827-67 (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1993), 416n.
256
102
common sentiment holds that man guilty of treason who prefers the United States to
South Carolina.”259 Union General Daniel Sickles reported similar findings, noting: “In
South Carolina there is very little pretense of loyalty. I believe I found less than fifty
men who admitted any love for the union. I have not seen an American flag raised by a
Carolinian. If one floated over a dwelling, or a hotel or a shop, the population would
avoid the place as they would a pesthouse filled with lepers.”260
As a result of South Carolina’s exclusion from a national identity, disunion was
perceived entirely different in South Carolina than in other parts of the country, and the
doctrines of secession and state sovereignty became sacrosanct within the state. South
Carolina was the only state at the Confederate Congress to support a constitutional
amendment specifically guaranteeing the right of secession.261 After the fall of the
Confederacy, South Carolinians were willing to admit defeat, but were not willing to
concede the validity of secession. The following is an excerpt from an 1866 interview
with Alexander P. Ketchum, a Union captain stationed in South Carolina during
Reconstruction, in the Report of the Joint Committee on Reconstruction:
Question. Do the mass of the people of South Carolina seem to have
repudiated, or laid aside, the doctrine of the right of secession?
Answer. No, sir.
Question. They accept the position, though; acknowledge the fact that they
are subdued, and that their scheme of secession, for the present, is a
failure?
Answer. They acknowledge that fully.
259
Sidney Andrews, The South Since the War: As Shown by Fourteen Weeks of Travel and Observation in Georgia and
the Carolinas (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1866), 391.
260
As quoted by Mark R. Jones, Wicked Charleston: The Dark Side of the Holy City (Charleston, SC: The History
Press, 2005), 102.
261
Cauthen, 88.
103
Question. Do I understand you to say that no instance has come under
your observation where a South Carolina secessionist has renounced the
doctrine of the rightfulness of secession?
Answer. Not one.262
This mindset persisted long after the defeat of the Confederacy. Ben Robertson,
remembering his grandmother, wrote in 1942:
To justify secession seemed constantly on her mind, an essential that she
must explain. It disturbed her incessantly, and she would repeat to us time
and again the legal reasons that had made it lawful under the Constitution
for us to dissolve the Union. The Union had been a pact, a mutual
agreement, and in any court of law a compact under circumstances could
be abolished.263
It was easier for Georgians or Virginians to see secession as unviable because they were
considered parts of a totality. For Georgia and Virginia, it was as if the Union was a
human body, of which they were the arms. Thus, disunion would be comparable to
amputation, painful to the body and ruinous to the appendage. But because of South
Carolina’s exclusion from a national identity, South Carolina both was and wasn’t a part
of the body; it would’ve been more like an accessory. Therefore, disunion in South
Carolina’s case would’ve been more like the act of removing a wig. Whereas Georgians
and Virginians feared the prospect of disunion, South Carolinians shared no such
ambivalence.
*****
Denied inclusion in an American national identity, South Carolinians were forced to
supplant American identity with a newly constructed state identity. As early as the
nullification crisis, British traveler G. W. Featherstonhaugh noted the emergence of such
262
“Report of the Joint Committee on Reconstruction at the First Session, Thirty-Ninth Congress,” (Washington, D.C.:
Government Printing Office, 1866), 235.
263
Ben Robertson, Red Hills and Cotton (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1942), 109.
104
an identity. While attending a dinner party in South Carolina, another guest informed
him: “If you ask me, if I am an American, my answer is No, sir, I am a South
Carolinian.”264 The development and proliferation of this identity increased during the
antebellum period. Hayne, Simms, and Brooks all contributed depth and substance to it,
and it persisted throughout the course of the war. When the C.S.S. Nashville encountered
a mysterious ship in the Georgetown harbor, Lieutenant W. C. Whittle’s inquiry, as to
whether its occupants were Federals or Confederates, was met with the reply: “We are
South Carolinians.”265 Likewise, upon learning of Robert E. Lee’s surrender at
Appomattox, General Martin W. Gary separated himself and his troops from their fellow
Confederates. “We,” proclaimed Gary, “are South Carolinians and don’t surrender.”266
Dying on the fields of Virginia, Maxcy Gregg showed little regret as he reflected upon
his impending death, considering he “cheerfully gave his life for the independence of
South Carolina.”267
Following the defeat of the South, Daniel Huger provided perhaps the most eloquent
expression of a South Carolina identity, even as he prepared to rejoin the union:
She is my mother; I have all my life loved what she loved, and hated what
she hated; everything she had I made my own, and every act of hers was
my act; as I have had but one hope, to live with her, so now I have but one
desire, to die on her soil and be laid in her bosom. If I am wrong in
everything else, I know I am right in loving South Carolina,--know I am
right in believing that, whatever glory the future may bring our reunited
country, it can neither brighten nor tarnish the glory of South Carolina.
264
As quoted by Ritchie Devon Watson, “ ‘The Difference of Race’: Antebellum Race Mythology and the
Development of Southern Nationalism,” The Southern Literary Journal, vol. 35, no. 1 (Fall 2002), 7.
265
John Baldwin and Ron Powers, Last Flag Down: The Epic Journey of the Last Confederate Warship (New York:
Three Rivers Press, 2007), 43.
266
Edward M. Boykin, The Falling Flag: Evacuation of Richmond, Retreat and Surrender at Appomattox (New York:
E. J. Hale & Son, 1874), 59-60.
267
As quoted by W. Scott Poole, South Carolina’s Civil War: A Narrative History (Macon, GA: Mercer University
Press, 2005), 109.
105
She has passed through the agony and the bloody sweat; as we now return
her to the Federal Union, let every man do his duty bravely before the
world, trustfully before God, remembering each man for himself that he is
a South-Carolinian….268
This unique state identity was largely responsible for the enthusiasm of most South
Carolinians following their state’s secession. Furthermore, this identity shaped and
defined South Carolina’s role in the coming war.
South Carolina played an unparalleled role in the American Civil War; a role whose
exceptionality should not be limited to being the first state to secede, the only state of the
Deep South to do so unanimously, and the first to fire the shots of war. Although those
three anomalies are noteworthy in their own right, they are merely a few of the numerous
idiosyncrasies which defined South Carolina’s role in the war. Nor should the act of
embracing and celebrating secession be relegated solely to the advocacy of slavery. The
development of a unique South Carolina psychology bears at least partial responsibility
for the state’s oddities. The disparity between South Carolinians and other Confederates
was politically, militarily, culturally and diplomatically evident. The state’s exclusion
from an American identity, and the subsequent emergence of a South Carolina identity,
directly influenced and guided every aspect of this disparity.
One might assume that the emergence of a state identity, and an awareness of how
other southerners viewed them, might inhibit South Carolina’s commitment to the
Confederacy. And to some degree, it did. Some South Carolinians expressed a great deal
of ambivalence over the formation of a new union. “A consolidation with Georgia and
Tennessee,” intimated Maxcy Gregg, “I regard only not quite so great an evil as
268
as quoted by Andrews, 52-53.
106
consolidation with New York and Ohio.”269 Lewis Malone Ayer seconded this
sentiment, telling his constituency he “should have as great objection to South Carolina
becoming a part of a Southern consolidation of States, as of the consolidation she is
presently threatened with.”270 Even during the middle of the war, this mindset persisted.
A North Carolinian traveling through the Palmetto State via train overheard a fellow
Confederate describing his home state: “I really think North Carolina is the tail end of the
Confederacy, and Tennessee is but little behind her—both these States are rotten to the
core—neither of them is possessed of any national pride.”271 Yet, South Carolina did join
the Confederacy, and offered it unwavering support. South Carolinians had not willingly
sought exclusion from American identity. It had been forced upon them. Perhaps the
majority of South Carolinians cherished the idea of union every bit as much as other
Americans. Their commitment to such a union, however, was contingent upon their
inclusion.
South Carolina’s role within the Confederate States of America was a stark contrast
to its role within the United States. Politically speaking, South Carolina went through
something akin to a rebirth after joining the Confederacy. When Charles Edward
Cauthen penned the history of South Carolina in the American Civil War, he found that
South Carolina was more cooperative with the Confederate Government than the
neighboring states of Georgia and North Carolina:
269
as quoted by W. Scott Poole, Never Surrender: Confederate Memory and Conservatism in the South Carolina
Upcountry (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2004), 31.
270
As quoted by Manisha Sinha, The Counterrevolution of Slavery: Politics and Ideology in Antebellum South
Carolina (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 115.
271
As quoted by Frank Moore, ed., Anecdotes, Poetry, and Incidents of the War: North and South: 1860-1865 (New
York, 1866), 399.
107
Through it all South Carolina on the whole stood loyally and courageously
for the Confederate cause….The masses of the people remained firm and
determined long after the hope of ultimate victory seemed slim indeed.
Probably no state officially cooperated more fully with the Confederate
government.272
It is particularly striking that South Carolina, the state that cooperated least with the
Federal Government in the era preceding the war, would be the most cooperative with the
Confederate government.
Just as South Carolina’s exclusion from American identity had facilitated the
universal support for, and celebration of, secession, and just as it had facilitated political
cooperation, so too did it enable South Carolinians to carry their war effort to a greater
degree than other Confederates. On average, South Carolina reported higher percentages
of enlistments, and lower percentages of substitutions, exemptions, and desertions, than
other Confederate States. When the Confederacy permitted the hiring of substitutes,
15,000 Virginians, 7,050 Georgians, and 2,040 North Carolinians took advantage of the
opportunity to have someone else fight in their stead, whereas only 751 South Carolinians
did so. At the time of Sherman’s invasion of South Carolina, the state had 5,839
exemptions, “a number small in comparison with other Southern states,” despite having
the most exemption categories of any Confederate State.273
Upcountry districts in the state matched the lowcountry districts in recruitment,
despite the different demographic makeup of the region and the absence of planter
272
Cauthen, 229.
Walter Edgar, South Carolina: A History (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1998), 358-360; Cauthen,
171, 177; Wallace Hettle, The Peculiar Democracy: Southern Democrats in Peace and Civil War (Athens: University
of Georgia Press, 2001), 97.
273
108
dominance.274 South Carolina was also the only Confederate State to raise not a single
white regiment for the Union.275 South Carolina led the nation in percentage of
casualties, and led the Confederacy by six percentage points, sacrificing 23% of its
fighting men, whereas North Carolina—the state with the second highest casualty
percentage—only lost 17%.276 Likewise, 84% of South Carolina’s soldiers expressed
patriotic sentiments, versus 48% of North Carolina’s.277 South Carolina’s commitment to
the war effort was the product of their exclusion from national identity, and their
awareness of a South Carolina identity. Long-time unionist leader Benjamin Perry of
Greenville wrote that South Carolinians were “all now going to the devil, and I will go
with you. Honor and patriotism require me to stand by my State, right or wrong.”278
In addition to being the most loyal to the government, and the most dedicated to the
war effort, South Carolinians were also the most fervent in their hatred of the enemy.
While conducting a series of interviews after the war, northerners found that “the great
masses of the people of South Carolina hate the government of the United States.”279
John Townsend Trowbridge came to a similar conclusion: “I found in South Carolina a
more virulent animosity existing in the minds of the common people, against government
and the people of the North, than in any other State I visited. Only in South Carolina was
274
Edgar, 358-360; J. Roderick Heller III and Carolynn Ayres Heller, eds., The Confederacy is on Her Way Up the
Spout: Letters to South Carolina, 1861-1864 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1998), 14-16.
275
Jack Bass and W. Scott Poole, The Palmetto State: The Making of Modern South Carolina (Columbia: University
of South Carolina Press, 2009), 47.
276
Frederic Cople Jaher, The Urban Establishment: Upper Strata in Boston, New York, Charleston, Chicago, and Los
Angeles (University of Illinois Press, 1982), 399; Donald Cartmell, The Civil War Book of Lists (Franklin Lakes, NJ:
Career Press, Inc., 2001), 95.
277
James M. McPherson, For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1997), 101; After noting this disparity, McPherson writes, “in the Union army there was no such regional
variation”
278
As quoted by Cauthen, 75.
279
“Report of the Joint Committee on Reconstruction at the First Session, Thirty-Ninth Congress,” (Washington, D.C.:
Government Printing Office, 1866), 218.
109
I treated with gross personal insults on account of my Northern origin.”280 “There is
nothing in all the dark caves of human passion,” observed a reporter for the London
Times, “so cruel and deadly as the hatred South Carolinians profess for Yankees.” 281
All of these anomalies and idiosyncrasies, when analyzed together, yield an
aggregate conclusion: what this war meant to South Carolinians was entirely different
from what it meant to other Confederates. After the close of the war, a Yankee prisoner
of war reflected upon the time he spent imprisoned in both Virginia and South Carolina:
Here let me say a somewhat personal word about South Carolina. Wanton
as was her conduct, there was an intensity, directness and courage about
her action which challenges admiration. The qualities which characterized
her as a state, I found in her people. During six months experience as a
prisoner of war in the States of Virginia and South Carolina, I had, for a
prisoner, rather exceptional opportunities for meeting people of both
States. The South Carolinians were like open and avowed foes, who had
no fear that kindness to a prisoner would compromise their attitude of
rebellion. With the Virginians there was a kind of sneakiness—a bearing
half apologetic for the State’s secession, and half timidity for fear any
show of magnanimity or kindness would cast doubt upon their
disunionism which made them very disagreeable jailors. I came home
feeling that the South Carolinians were good enemies.282
Virginians were included in the antebellum construction of American identity, and were
thus forced to grapple with the implications of conflicting identities and allegiances
during the war. South Carolina’s exclusion allowed the people of the Palmetto State to
remain totally committed to the cause of the Confederacy. Just as northern soldiers could
pillage the state of South Carolina and believe they were doing something ultimately
280
as quoted by Trowbridge, 568.
As quoted by W. Scott Poole, South Carolina’s Civil War, 14.
282
W. H. Withington, Michigan in the Opening of the War: A Paper Read Before Michigan Commandery of the
Military Order of the Loyal Legion of the United States, March 2nd, 1887 (Detroit: Ostler Printing Company, 1887), 4.
281
110
noble, South Carolinians could imprison northern soldiers without a guilty conscience.
They weren’t in a war with their former countrymen, but their ancient enemies.
The use of history, by Webster, Sabine, and Sumner, was the means by which
Americans excluded South Carolina from their conception of American identity, and it
was the process by which South Carolina became emotionally detached from the Union.
By severing South Carolina from American identity through historic vehicles, rather than
current actions and behavior, Sumner precluded the opportunity for the conditional
inclusion of any South Carolinian. This exclusion helped drive the South Carolina
secession movement—not in the sense that South Carolinians seceded as a result of it, but
in that they celebrated and embraced secession because of it. Every other southern state
resisted the disunionist impulse because it was their union. The exclusion of South
Carolinians from that union—in perception if not it actuality—allowed them to sever
their ties with other states universally and wholeheartedly. At the root of this severance
was an acute awareness of their negligible place in the union, forced upon them by
Webster, Sabine, and Sumner.
The words of Webster, Sabine and Sumner fueled the extremism of Hayne, Simms
and Brooks. If these men were reacting to the attacks upon South Carolina’s history,
isn’t it probable that those attacks induced a similar reaction in other South Carolinians?
No other State behaved like South Carolina in the decades leading up to the Civil War,
and no other State was nationally criticized like South Carolina. Herein lies the impetus
for the Problem of South Carolina. By 1856, no South Carolinian was exempt from the
condemnation of Americans like Charles Sumner. South Carolina’s awareness of, and
111
sensitivity to, this condemnation cannot be underestimated. One week before South
Carolinians dissolved their bonds with the United States of America, the Yorkville
Enquirer included a poem, entitled “From S. Carolina to the North,” previously printed in
the Charleston Mercury:
Too long for the sake of the faith I once plighted,
Have I borne to be cruelly slandered and slighted—
Till patient endurance, o’er burthened{sic} at last,
All tender regrets from my memory cast—
Away rolled the mist of affectionate blindness,
In the balance of truth I weighed your unkindness,
No touching remembrance of sires before us,
Who lifted together their voices in chorus,
In the holiest hymn independence e’er heard,
When the chords of their souls by her presence were stirred,
Can counterpoise wrongs and oppressions, for years
Inflicted on Sovereign States, your compeers.
Every son on the soil or snowy-fleece born,
Feels for you and your minions, ineffable scorn.283
For decades South Carolinians had been slandered and slighted by their fellow
Americans, and by 1860, there was no history powerful enough to keep them in the
Union. As South Carolinians awaited the disunion of other southern states in the days
immediately following their own secession, the Keowee Courier optimistically declared:
“In a few days the majority, if not all of the Southern States, will be out of the Union, and
we will then form a Southern Confederacy—not such a Confederacy as we have just left,
but a Confederacy of States and people who love, cherish and respect each other.”284
283
284
Yorkville Enquirer, 13 December 1861.
Keowee Courier, 5 January 1861.
112
CONCLUSION
“…the nation survives as a unit because people continue to feel a psychological sense of
unity.”285
-David M. Potter
Susan-Mary Grant, analyzing the development of northern nationalism and its
influence on American identity, detailed how northerners excluded the South from their
construction of American nationality. “National construction requires some kind of
negative reference point against which to define the nation,” writes Grant,“….the South
was the obvious—and perhaps the only—negative reference point for northerners to turn
to.”286 As Grant adeptly shows, South Carolina was not alone in its exclusion from an
American national narrative. However, South Carolina was the paradigm for this
process. South Carolina was excluded earlier, more thoroughly, more explicitly and
more completely than the rest of the South. Furthermore, South Carolina was excluded
by both the North and the South. Between 1829 and 1856, South Carolina underwent a
very different experience from that of other Southern States. This disparity was critical
to the development of a distinct South Carolina psychology.
By 1860, Daniel Webster had excluded South Carolina’s doctrine of State
interposition, Lorenzo Sabine had excluded South Carolina’s history, and Charles
Sumner had excluded South Carolina, in its entirety, from an American national
narrative. South Carolina’s remarkable role during this period of American history
merits a remarkable explanation. If South Carolinians were displaying aberrant,
extraordinary behavior, the stimulus for such behavior would have been distinctly
285
Potter, “The Historians Use of Nationalism and Vice Versa,” 928.
Susan-Mary Grant, North Over South: Northern Nationalism and American Identity in the Antebellum Era
(Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2000), 154.
286
113
applicable to South Carolinians and South Carolinians alone. Exclusion from American
history became distinctly applicable to South Carolinians during the decades preceding
the Civil War. And just as this exclusion invoked radical behavior from Robert Young
Hanye, William Gilmore Simms, and Preston Smith Brooks, it evoked similar behavior
from the rest of white South Carolina.
Norman W. Spalding summarizes the implications of such exclusion:
Stable and coherent national narratives do not simply provide
emotional legitimacy. In modern liberal democracies, where sovereign
power operates on the principles of consent, public accountability, and
constitutional restraint, national narratives also confer political
legitimacy—they define the discursive space for the negotiation and
justification of political power by regulating the collective memory of a
nation’s fundamental commitments.287
South Carolina’s exclusion from the American national narrative rendered its people
politically illegitimate and, thus, unable to influence government policy. Every position
they supported was impotent because their support made it unviable and un-American.
Like all Americans, South Carolinians had inherited the right to representative selfgovernment. They were entitled to a voice, a vote, and a place in the democratic process.
When they were excluded from the national narrative, they were denied their rights.
They became powerless to influence their destiny within the union. This is what drove
their extremism. This is what engendered “the problem of South Carolina.” Other
southerners could protest and protect their interests within the union, while South
Carolina was forced to seek redress outside of it. Secession was their only option.
287
Norman W. Spaulding, “Constitution as Countermonument: Federalism, Reconstruction, and the Problem of
Collective Memory,” The Columbia Law Review, vol. 103, no. 8 (Dec., 2003), 1998, in JSTOR [database online];
accessed Dec. 4, 2007.
114
More importantly, recognizing South Carolina’s exclusion from a unifying national
narrative alters the history of South Carolina secession and the American Civil War. The
argument for northern opposition to secession was predicated upon the basic premises of
democracy and the inclusion of South Carolinians in an aggregate American whole.
“Unless a minority really is identified with and part of such a totality, the decisions of the
majority lack any democratic sanction. Hence the question whether the controlling group
and the dissident group form a real, verifiable totality is vital and decisive.”288 According
to Daniel Webster and Abraham Lincoln’s conception of the Union and American
nationality, nullification and secession were only unviable so long as the seceding
minority was considered an essential part of an American whole. By 1860, South
Carolina was not.
288
Potter, “The Historian’s Use of Nationalism and Vice Versa,” 929.
115
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